ABSTRACT
As a legal theorist, Jeremy Bentham was a positivist who regarded an overwhelmingly important field of jurisprudential inquiry to be that of answering the question: what is law? in terms of the empirically demonstrable facts of power, sovereignty and sanctions. He was also a renowned reformer, who believed that the process of legislation should be geared towards the realisation of ‘the good’, which in turn meant that all legislation must be aimed at providing abundance and security, and at the reduction of inequalities between citizens in society. Bentham, however, rejected the approach of Natural Law thinkers which sought to identify the ‘good’ in law with some higher set of moral principles derivable by reason from some metaphysical source such as nature or God.
