The Hermit and the Boa Constrictor: Jeremy Bentham, Henry Brougham, and the Accessibility of Justice

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the particularly complex relationship between Jeremy Bentham and Henry Brougham, with reference to the respective schemes that they devised in the late 1820s and early 1830s for achieving accessible justice through a new network of local courts across England and Wales. For a considerable part of the first few decades of the nineteenth century, Bentham and Brougham remained great friends and allies, but their disagreements gradually intensified, most notably following Brougham's six-hour law reform speech in the House of Commons on 7 February 1828, the printing of his Local Courts Bill on 7 June 1830, and the beginning of his Lord Chancellorship on 22 November of the same year. By analysing Bentham's highly detailed annotated copies of Brougham's law reform speech and Local Courts Bill—as well as Bentham's articles in the Westminster Review, and a substantial portion of his unpublished writings—it is shown how Bentham's complete loss of faith in Brougham as a reformer and as a legislator led him from describing Brougham as his own grandson to calling him an enemy of the people and a serpent. It is argued that the severity of Bentham's criticisms of the then Lord Chancellor in print, and the personal nature of the insults that he levelled towards him in manuscript, effectively dispel any suggestion that the two men were acting in concert on the issue of law reform in general, or on the matter of local courts in particular.