The mirror of justice : literary reflections of legal crises
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The mirror of justice : literary reflections of legal crises
（Princeton paperbacks）
Princeton University Press, 2003
- : pbk
Available at 4 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 273-314) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This book studies major works of literature from classical antiquity to the present that reflect crises in the evolution of Western law: the move from a prelegal to a legal society in The Eumenides, the Christianization of Germanic law in Njal's Saga, the disenchantment with medieval customary law in Reynard the Fox, the reception of Roman law in a variety of Renaissance texts, the conflict between law and equity in Antigone and The Merchant of Venice, the eighteenth-century codification controversy in the works of Kleist, the modern debate between "pure" and "free" law in Kafka's The Trial and other fin-de-siecle works, and the effects of totalitarianism, the theory of universal guilt, and anarchism in the twentieth century. Using principles from the anthropological theory of legal evolution, the book locates the works in their legal contexts and traces through them the gradual dissociation over the centuries of law and morality. It thereby associates and illuminates these masterpieces from an original point of view and contributes a new dimension to the study of literature and law.
In contrast to prevailing adherents of Law-and-Literature, this book professes Literature-and-Law, in which the emphasis is historical rather than theoretical, substantive rather than rhetorical, and literary rather than legal. Instead of adducing the literary work to illustrate debates about modern law, this book consults the history of law as an essential aid to the understanding of the literary text and its conflicts.
Table of Contents
PrefaceCh. 1Introduction3Ch. 2The Birth of Justice from the Spirit of Tragedy20Ch. 3The Ambivalence toward Pagan Law42Ch. 4The Role of Rome63Ch. 5The Disenchantment with Customary Law74Ch. 6The Reception of Roman Law in Germany98Ch. 7European Variations130Ch. 8Law and Equity I144Ch. 9Law and Equity II163Ch. 10The Attractions of Codification187Ch. 11The Modern Crisis of Law215Ch. 12Twentieth-Century Legal Evolutions241Notes273Index315
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