Novel Judgements
Legal Theory as Fiction
William P. MacNeil
Published October 13, 2011 by Routledge-Cavendish
Published September 8, 2011 by Routledge-Cavendish
Novel Judgements: Legal Theory as Fiction
Novel Judgements is a book about nineteenth century Anglo-American law and literature. But by redefining law as legal theory, Novel judgements departs from 'socio-legal' studies of law and literature, often dated in their focus on past lawyering and court processes. This texts 'theoretical turn' renders the period's 'law-and-literature' relevant to today's readers because the nineteenth century novel, when "read jurisprudentially", abounds in representations of law's controlling concepts, many of which are still with us today. Rights, justice, law's morality; each are encoded novelistically in stock devices such as the country house, friendship, love, courtship and marriage. In so rendering the public (law) as private (domesticity), these novels expose for legal and literary scholars alike the ways in which law comes to mediate all relationships—individual and collective, personal and political—during the nineteenth century, a period as much under the Rule of Law as the reign of Capital. So these novels pass judgement—a novel judgement—on the extent to which the nineteenth century's idea of law is collusive with that era's Capital, thereby opening up the possibility of a new legal theoretical position: that of a critique of the law and a law of critique.
1.Pro lex omenon: Towards a Novel Legal Theory of the Novel as Legal Theory 2. John Austin or Jane Austen? The Province of Jurisprudence Determined in Pride and Prejudice 3.Jousting with Bentham: Utility, Morality and Ethics in Ivanhoe's Tournament of Law 4. The Monstrous Body of the Law: Wollstonecraft vs. Shelley 5. Hawthorne 's Haunted House of Law: The Romance of American Legal Realism in The House of the Seven Gables 6. In Boz We Trust! Bleak House's (Re)Imagination of Trusteeship.7: Two on a Guillotine? Courts and 'Crits' in A Tale of Two Cities 8. Beyond Governmentality: The Question of Justice in Great Expectations 9. A Jurisprudential Postscript: Century's Close and the End of of the (Meta)Narrative of Law
William P. MacNeil is the Dean of the Griffith Law School, Queensland, Australia. Trained in both law and literature, MacNeil has published widely in the field of cultural legal studies.
Much the strength of Novel Judgements comes from its confident joining of the Victorian 'juridical imaginary' to the topoi of legal theory. - Shaun McVeigh for Law, Literature and the Humanities Association of Australasia
MacNeil's book largely succeeds in showing what we can learn about legal critiques by reading certain works of fiction with a jurisprudential eye. - Jane J. Lee, University of Washington, for Review 19
Discourses of Law
Popular Culture & Law
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies