built on his desire to understand everything in terms of real entities which could be the subject of experience.3 From this base, he defined law in positivist terms, as an expression of will backed by a power to exact obedience. Bentham’s work was rigorous and relentless, and he was never shy of entering into the minutest detail.4 It was on the basis of these theoretical foundations that Bentham created an ideal model of a system of law, set into a code.5 Jeremy Bentham certainly exerted a very strong influence on nineteenth jurists. His persistent critique of the common law, and his call for jurists to think of law in terms of rules set by authority to guide conduct, clearly hit their target. As Henry Brougham put it, “the age of law reform and the age of Jeremy Bentham are one and the same.”6 As this comment suggests, Bentham had a significant influence on the movement to reform legal procedure and legal institutions. By the time Brougham had begun his initiative to reform the English legal system, reformers had been able to read Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827), which argued for a radical reform of the law of evidence, and which continued Bentham’s earlier public pronouncements calling for a rational reform of the structure of the courts. The decades which followed his death saw significant reforms of the structure of the courts, with the creation of system of new county courts in1846and the consolidation of the superior courts in 1875. In the same era, procedure was simplified and rationalized, and the law of evidence was overhauled.7 However, if Bentham was in many ways éminence grise of law rem i cha e l lob ban 133 3 Philip Schofield, Utility and Democracy: the Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham(Oxford, 2006). 4 As Mill put it, Bentham“was in no respect fitted to excel as a metaphysician”, but he had a “practical mind”, which carried “the war of criticism and refutation [...] into the field of practical evils”, with a relentlessness of purpose and detail: ‘Bentham’, in J. S.Mill, Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, inThe CollectedWorks of John Stuart Mill, vol. X (University of Toronto Press), pp. 80-1. 5 On Bentham’s project for a code, see especially Gerald J. Postema, Bentham and the Common LawTradition (Oxford, 1986), David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1989), and Michael Lobban, The Common Law and English Jurispudence, 1760-1850(Oxford,1991). 6 H. Brougham,Speeches of Henry Lord Brougham upon Questions relating to Public Rights, Duties & Interests, (Edinburgh, 1838), vol. II, p.288. It was a sentiment repeated continuously throughout the mid-nineteenth century: see C.J.W. Allen, The Law of Evidence inVictorian England (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 4-8. 7 The mid- and late-century saw reforms to remove exclusionary evidence rules of the kind which Bentham abhorred: legislation in1843therefore allowed interested
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