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enhance the happiness of the people—a dictate that, in his view, also coincides with natural law. Like Bentham, Hoffman was hostile to common law and was a proponent of “codification”—that is, of reducing the law to a written code to free it from the obscurities and irrationalities of common law. Codification was also the focus of Edward Livingston’s energies over many years. Among other things, he put before the Louisiana state legislature a comprehensive code of penal law, subsequently expanded and published as A System of Penal Law (1833), the two volumes of which were heavily indebted to Bentham. Livingston failed in his immediate goal of systematizing Louisiana law and reforming it in a utilitarian direction, but his work inspired reformers in other states. The next chapter surveys the lively debate over the death penalty during these years. Rights-based arguments and utilitarian arguments were advanced on both sides of the issue. Like Cesare Beccaria, Bentham opposed capital punishment. Livingston developed the utilitarian case against it but recognized, as did Bentham, that the evidence was insufficient to establish conclusively whether or not the deterrent effect of capital punishment was superior to that of imprisonment. In the short term, religious arguments in favour of it prevailed, but in the postbellum period many states abandoned capital punishment (although a number were to reverse themselves again by 1920). Crimmins devotes a separate chapter to Thomas Cooper, an early proponent of secular utilitarianism and a strong advocate of democracy, free trade and unconstrained freedom of speech. Denounced in Parliament by Burke for his support of the French Revolution, Cooper joined his close friend Joseph Priestley, from whom he had absorbed utilitarianism, in emigrating to America. An ally of Jefferson, Cooper was imprisoned for six months for his criticisms of the John Adams administration. He taught for several years at what is now Dickinson College, but Virginia Presbyterians, upset by his materialism, stymied Jefferson’s effort to appoint him to the faculty of the newly founded University of Virginia. Later, when he was professor and president of what is now the University of South Carolina, local religious leaders forced him out of office. His views were close to Bentham’s, and he discussed with some subtlety various issues in utilitarianism, such as the possible divergence between people’s real and apparent interests. His career, however, ended in ignominy. Although an early opponent of slavery, he inexplicably came to champion it, even abandoning his freespeech principles to support criminalizing the dissemination of abolitionist ideas in the South. In a brief epilogue, Crimmins steps outside his chosen time frame to discuss the impact in later decades of utilitarianism on pragmatism, that distinctively American philosophy. The pragmatists took utilitarianism seriously and were admirers, in particular, of John Stuart Mill, to whom William James dedicated his famous lectures on pragmatism. In sum, this historically and philosophically informed study illuminates well a small, neglected, yet significant aspect of early American history.