The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal CrisesThis 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. |
Contents
3 | |
20 | |
The Ambivalence toward Pagan Law | 42 |
The Role of Rome | 63 |
The Disenchantment with Customary Law | 74 |
The Reception of Roman Law in Germany | 98 |
European Variations | 130 |
Law and Equity I | 144 |
Law and Equity II | 163 |
The Attractions of Codification | 187 |
The Modern Crisis of Law | 215 |
TwentiethCentury Legal Evolutions | 241 |
NOTES | 273 |
INDEX | 315 |
Other editions - View all
The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises Theodore Ziolkowski Limited preview - 2003 |
The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises Theodore Ziolkowski No preview available - 1997 |