form, recent research has shown that in practice, reform of legal institutions and procedures was generally a pragmatic exercise, engaged in by lawyers whose views of the goal to be achieved was often quite different from Bentham’s.8 When it came to substantive law, Bentham’s theoretical writings perhaps had their greatest influence in the reform of the criminal law.Reformers were certainly familiar with Bentham’s jurisprudence from his Traités de législation civile et pénale, edited and translated by Etienne Dumont in1802.9 In the treatise on penal law, Bentham set out a classification of offences, and discussed matters such as motive, intention and justifications.This work in many ways made Bentham’s name and provided an analytical vocabulary for the reformers of criminal law.Yet even in this area, Bentham’s desire for a code was not carried through, despite the repeated attempts by Brougham to introduce a code.10 It was made clear in the debates which commenced in the late 1820s and continued through the middle of the century that the English legal profession - and the wider political world - shared Savigny’s scepticism about codification.11 By contrast, his writings on civil lawwere much less influential,for his civil law writings were too philosophical to be of practical use for lawyers seeking a guide to the nature of contract or tort. If utilitarian notions of providing material disincentives on the conscious mind of the would-be delinquent found a ready audience among law reformers, Bentham’s utilitarian discussion of the ends of civil law - the subordinate utilitarian ends of subsistence, abundance, equality and security - was less influential. Nevertheless, although his philosophical justification of the ends of property and obligation law did not attract as much re cht swi s s e n scha f t al s j ur i st i sch e dok t r i n 134 persons to testify, legislation in 1851 allowed parties to a cause to testify and legislation in 1898 allowed the accused in criminal cases to testify on oath. 8 See M. Lobban,‘Henry Brougham and Law Reform,’ English Historical Review115 (2000) 1184-1215; J. Stuart Anderson, Lawyers and the Making of English Land Law (Oxford, 1992). 9 J. Bentham, The Theory of Legislation, ed and intro C.K. Ogden, London 1931. 10 On the relationship between Brougham’s Criminal Law Commission and Bentham’s theory, see L. Farmer,‘Reconstructing the English Codification Debate: the Criminal Law Commissioners, 1833-45,’ Law and History Review18 (2000) pp.397425and M. Lobban’How Benthamic was the Criminal Law Commission?’ Law and History Review18 (2000) pp. 427-32. 11 In1831,Abraham Hayward translated Savigny’s tract against Thibaut’s codification proposals as Of theVocation of our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence.
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