JEREMY BENTHAM
JEREMY BENTHAM ( 1748 – 1832 ) laid down the foundation of positivism in the modern sense of term. He was a ferment champion of codified law & of reforming English law, which was, according to him, in utter chaos. He distinguished b/w ‘expositional jurisprudence (what the law is)’ & ‘censorial jurisprudence (what law ought to be) or the art of legislation’. The main function of the former was ‘to evaluate law’, while that of the later ‘to analyse law’. In seeking answers to the questions { What is a penal code of laws? / What is a civil code? }, he had to investigate the nature of law, which led him into a maze through which he mapped out a path of laws in general. This was finished more or less in 1782, but remained unpublished till 1939 when Prof. Everett disinterred it & published under the title ‘The Limits of Jurisprudence Defined’ in 1945. A revised edition was published as ‘Laws in General’ in 1970 under the editorship of Prof. H.L.A. Hart.
Bentham gave the ‘Principle of Utility’, which says, “Only those laws are important, which give maximum happiness to the maximum number of people”. Those laws, which r not giving maximum pleasure & giving maximum pain to the people ought to be removed. Pleasure & pain r the basic ingredients of this principle. He also gave “Hedonistic Calculus, which is the imaginary principle to judge pleasure & pain of any law”.
