Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeremy Bentham

Bentham lands the jab with the economy of a man who distrusted ornament almost as much as he distrusted lawyers. The line doesn’t merely accuse attorneys of opportunism; it indicts a whole legal ecology that manufactures opacity and then sells clarity back to the public at hourly rates. “Power” here isn’t moral authority or civic virtue. It’s leverage: the ability to steer outcomes when rules are elastic, precedents are muddy, and procedure becomes its own private dialect.

The subtext is aggressively reformist. Bentham’s utilitarian project wanted law to behave like a public utility: legible, predictable, and engineered for the greatest happiness, not for professional mystique. By framing uncertainty as the lawyer’s fuel, he suggests that complexity isn’t an unfortunate byproduct of governing a messy society; it’s an asset for a specialized class. The lawyer becomes less a guardian of justice than a broker of risk, profiting from the gap between what the law claims to be (objective, principled) and how it functions (interpreted, negotiated, contingent).

Context matters: Bentham wrote in an England where common law evolved through case-by-case accretion, Latinisms, and procedural traps that could feel like a maze by design. His critique isn’t anti-law so much as anti-esoterica. He’s targeting the incentives that keep statutes vague, doctrines contradictory, and courts dependent on priestly intermediaries. Read now, it plays like an early warning about any system where expertise thrives on preventable confusion: when rules aren’t understandable to the people they govern, governance quietly shifts from democracy to consultancy.