Postema and the Common Law Tradition

First published in 1986, Gerald Postema’s pathbreaking and influential Bentham and the Common Law Tradition offered a controversial interpretation of how Bentham sought to combine the certainty of a code with flexibility in adjudication. A second edition of the work came out in 2019, with a significant new Afterword in which Postema addresses some of the criticisms of his interpretation. This article revisits some of Postema’s arguments in the book, assesses the Afterword, and considers how his arguments might have been modified in view of other work he has done on the common law mind.