The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal CrisesPrinceton University Press, 2003 - 322 pages 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-siècle 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. |
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Contents
Introduction | 3 |
The Evolution of Law | 6 |
The Dissociation of Law and Morality | 14 |
The Birth of Justice from the Spirit of Tragedy | 20 |
The Law of Blood | 21 |
Blood Vengeance in the Oresteia | 24 |
Aeschylus and the Areopagus | 30 |
The Eumenides | 33 |
Law and Equity I | 144 |
Antigone in Context | 146 |
Antigone and Creon | 152 |
Sophocles and Athens | 156 |
From Unwritten Law to Epieikeia | 159 |
Law and Equity II | 163 |
Equity and Anomy in Elizabethan England | 167 |
Judicial Irregularities | 174 |
The Ambivalence toward Pagan Law | 42 |
Njals Saga | 44 |
Legal Reality and the Aesthetics of Law | 51 |
Pagan Ethos and Christian Ethics | 57 |
Njala and Oresteia | 61 |
The Role of Rome | 63 |
From Codification to Customary Law | 65 |
The Situations in Germany | 69 |
The Disenchantment with Customary Law | 74 |
The Trial of the Fox | 80 |
The Old French Renart | 82 |
The Middle High German Reinhart | 89 |
The Flemish Reinaert | 93 |
The Reception of Roman Law in Germany | 98 |
Johannes Reuchlin | 106 |
Ulrich von Hutten | 111 |
Philipp Melanchthon | 121 |
European Variations | 130 |
Sir Thomas More | 132 |
Francois Rabelais | 134 |
The State of Anomy | 182 |
The Attractions of Codification | 187 |
The Codification Controversy in Germany | 191 |
Kleists and the Prussian Code | 194 |
The Prussian Code in Kleists Works | 201 |
Kleists Critique of the Judicial System | 207 |
The Affirmation of Positive Law | 209 |
The Modern Crisis of Law | 215 |
Kafha and the Law | 224 |
A Burlesque of Legal Procedure | 226 |
Kafkas Critique of the Law | 233 |
TwentiethCentury Legal Evolutions | 241 |
Totalitarian Law | 242 |
The Soviet Venue | 252 |
The Theory of Universal Guilt | 256 |
The Lure of Anarchism | 263 |
Justitia rediviva | 270 |
NOTES | 273 |
315 | |
Other editions - View all
The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises Theodore Ziolkowski Limited preview - 2018 |
The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises Theodore Ziolkowski No preview available - 1997 |