Elements of jurisprudence, being selections from Dumont's digest of the works of Bentham

Abstract

This volume presents selections translated by Thomas Dunbar Ingram from Étienne Dumont’s digest of Jeremy Bentham’s works on codification, edited with an introduction and commentary by W. Neilson Hancock for legal education. In the introduction, Hancock defines jurisprudence as the science of human laws, distinguishing it from both the practical art of legal practice and the adjacent social sciences of political economy and moral philosophy. The text advocates replacing unwritten legal regimes with a comprehensive, written code grounded in the principle of general utility. It identifies three essential structural requirements for a rational legal system: integrality, meaning the code must exhaustively define legal obligations without reliance on unwritten custom; cognoscibility, requiring transparent classification, accessible style, and separation of general from specialized laws; and justifiability, necessitating an accompanying explanatory commentary that articulates the reasons behind each statute. Through analyses attributed to Bentham and an essay by Sir Samuel Romilly, the treatise critiques common law as a retroactive, unpredictable, and judge-made fiction sustained by technical fictions and competing analogies. Finally, the work examines historical and contemporary efforts toward statutory reform in England, reviewing Lord Bacon’s seventeenth-century proposal for pruning and digesting the law as well as Sir Robert Peel’s 1825–1826 parliamentary measures consolidating fragmented statutes on juries and larceny. – AI-generated abstract.