On Bentham 's Definition And Coordination Of Legislation And Legal Science

Legislative science contains two aspects:one is the principle of utility and one is legislative power which is built on the basis of the principle of utility. On the one hand, the concept of legal science is the logic of the legal reasoning, on the other hand, it is the written law. The legal science contains the strong desire of Bentham legislative reform. For Bentham, the biggest obstacle in the process of legislative reform was the common law. Bentham strongly recommended that a systematic code of law should replace the common law which was unwritten and closed. He advocated using neutral legal language, the introduction of the Interpretation Act and the concept of logic fictional to remove the metaphor and vagueness in the language. Bentham constructed an exhaustive classification system and took the codification as the formal pursuit of the law. The significance of distinguishing between the legislative science and the legal science includes two aspects:giving the highest authority to legislators who were under the guidance of the principle of utility and opening the road of development of legal positivism by distinguishing between the "law as it is" and the "law as it ought to be". Legislators owned the highest authority, but there was a premise that the legislators should exercise legislative power under the guidance of the principle of utility. This meant that the power of the legislator was limited. Specialization of the legal science was to tell us that the law should be built on a system which included stringent requirements such as mathematics. However, an insurmountable gap between the principle of utility and the real law does exist. And the gap was just caused by sovereigns who had unlimited legislative power and judges who had been tempted by evil interests. The distinction between legislative science and legal science has reflected in the British constitutional system and judicial procedures. Through the work of coordinating the tension between legislative science with legal science, the solution was political reform. Bentham raised questions about the British Parliamentary System, and then designed the Constitutional Code. His fundamental purpose was to prevent bad governance. The democratic framework of the Constitutional Code had provided the best protection for public opinion, and ensured the government’s "openness" to form a good government to promote the interests of people.