It is wonderful how forward some have been to look upon it as a kind of presumption and ingratitude, and rebellion, and cruelty, and I know not what besides, not to allege only, nor to own, but to suffer any one so much as to imagine, than an old-established law could in any respect be a fit object of condemnation. Whether it has been a kind of personification that has been the cause of this, as if the Law were a living creature, or whether it has been the mechanical veneration of antiquity, or what other delusion of the fancy, I shall not here enquire. For my part, I know not for what good reason it is that the merit of justifying a law when right should have been thought greater, than that of censuring it when wrong.

Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government, London, 1776, preface