There might then occur that state of many competitive governments which is such a breath of fresh air, and such a provider of liberty, in the United States.That would require a constitutional code delimiting these powers, and probably the extent to which each level of government should be entitled to use them to infringe individual rights.
As Bentham put it in Leading Principles of a Constitutional Code, "the more remote from equality are the shares … the less is the sum of felicity produced by the sum of those shares" (1838 43, II, 276).
As well as a fully written constitution, the research sets out two other options for codifying existing constitutional provisions and conventions: a constitutional code - a document, sanctioned by Parliament but without statutory authority, which would set out the essential elements and principles of the constitution and the working of government.
Leiva wrote a constitutional code to regulate the actions of the Junta.
A volume of his Constitutional Code, which he did not live to complete, was published in 1830.
In the first instance this would require the establishment of a public archive of government actions and activities containing records of law, policy, legislative debate, and statistics, which the government would be constitutionally required to make available to the public by a freedom of information provision in the constitutional code to ensure transparency.
"Of this constitution", he announced near the beginning of the Constitutional Code, "the all-comprehensive object, or end in view, is, from first to last, the greatest happiness of the greatest number; namely, of the individuals, of whom, the political community, or state, of which it is the constitution, is composed" (1983b, 18).
In the years following, Bentham produced draft upon draft of elements of the Constitutional Code, only the first of three volumes of which was published during his lifetime.
If the utilitarian Constitutional Code was directed "for the use of all nations and all governments professing liberal opinions", as its title page declared, the political positions it embraced were recommended, in the first instance, for adoption at home.
The administrative, electoral and legislative details of this project occupied much of the last decade of his life, with its core ideas discussed in the pages of a variety of works in addition to the Code, such as Securities Against Misrule, First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code, and Official Aptitude Maximized; Expense Minimized.
As he explained it in the Constitutional Code, even if the self-preference principle "held good in no more than a bare majority, of the whole number of instances, it would suffice for every practical purpose, in the character of a ground for all political arrangements" (1838 43, IX, 6).
