 Hildreth, whose own Theory of Morals (1844) drew substantially on the Traités, was correct in thinking that law reformers in the United States would find sustenance in Bentham’s critical jurisprudence. Thomas Cooper, who left England for the United States in 1794 with Joseph Priestley, from whom he initially derived his utilitarianism, was a confirmed Benthamite by the 1820s and the intended recipient of writings Bentham entrusted to John Quincy Adams. Thereafter Cooper employed utilitarian principles in his writings on law and political economy, most notably in the Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy (1826), based on the lectures he gave at South Carolina College in Columbia, the first course of lectures on the subject in America. Edward Livingston, the famous author of codes of law for Louisiana, corresponded with Bentham, who sent him books for his research. Livingston acknowledged it was his reading of the Traités which “fortified me in a design to prosecute the subject” of a code of penal law (1838–43, XI, 51). In its final comprehensive and systematic version, Livingston’s System of Penal Law (1833) was celebrated by many continental jurists and became the centrepiece of the codification campaign in the United States—a campaign Bentham had attempted to launch himself some years earlier by directing copies of his Papers Relative to Codification and Public Instruction (1817) to a number of well-placed American politicians. The freethinker Gilbert Vale used his position as editor of the radical periodical The Diamond (1840–42)—like The Yankee, published with the banner heading “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”—to disseminate Bentham’s criticisms of the vagaries, chicanery, and technicalities of the law. Inspired by Bentham, Vale was in favour of humane penal laws that proportioned penalties to the objective of deterrence and an advocate of state intervention to alter the social circumstances that fostered crime. John O’Sullivan, the quixotic editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, wrote sympathetic reviews of Bentham, Livingston, and Hildreth, and followed them in advocating utilitarian law reform, particularly the abolition of the death penalty. Bentham’s influence on these figures is discussed in detail in Crimmins (2022).