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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 75
... lawyers as a profession but by a skepticism regarding the law as an institution . As lawyer jokes prolif- erate , applications to law schools decline . The legal fictions of William J. Coughlin , John Grisham , George Higgins , Steve ...
... lawyers . There are no lawyers in Antigone ; the only lawyer in Reynard the Fox is a minor figure of ridicule ; the “ lawyer ” in The Merchant of Venice is an impostor . The message that cries out to us from the centuries that produced ...
... lawyers . These critics , approaching litera- ture from the standpoint of law , are concerned primarily with law in literature ( that is , depictions of law , lawyers , and legal procedures in literary works ) and law as literature ...
... lawyers with their quali- fications and questions . THIS BOOK revolves around seven major works ( chaps . 2 , 3 , 5 , 8–11 ) that reflect epoch - making upheavals in the history of law . In each case the literary work is related to its ...
... lawyers and judges , to whom I presented a slide - lecture , " The Figure of Justitia in Art and Litera- ture ” —a fascinating topic that I decided not to include here as a separate chapter lest it shatter the framework and continuity ...
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 |