ABSTRACT
The ideal Jeremy Bentham has in view puts great demands on the rationality of the legislator. The theoretical framework would exhibit a common standard, to which the several systems of law prevailing in every country may respectively be compared. Modern deontic logic is a successor of Bentham's logic of imperation. Imperatives have a central place in Bentham's theory. One of the least 'inexplicit or oblique' varieties, says Bentham, is a sentence in the imperative mood, illustrated by 'Export no corn'. The language of assignment, cases and solutions, seems well fitted for a logically regimented representation of a number of distinctions made in Bentham's Limits. Bentham emphasises that a principal command is not a 'compleat law' unless certain additional requirements are fulfilled. In particular, these requirements refer to what Bentham calls the 'connections' of the command, namely the subsidiary laws that relate to the command.
