Note 117 — Chapter VII · LEGISLATION.
Reading edition
On this and other grounds “judge-made law,” as he called it, was the object of constant denunciation by Bentham. “It is the judges,” he says in his vigorous way (Works, V. 235), “that make the common law. Do you know how they make it? Just as a man makes laws for his dog. When your dog does anything you want to break him of, you wait till he does it and then beat him. This is the way you make laws for your dog, and this is the way the judges make laws for you and me.”