Novel Judgements Legal Theory as Fiction [Hardcover]

Novel Judgementsis a book about nineteenth century Anglo-American law and literature. But by redefining law as legal theory, Novel judgementsdeparts 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 periods law-and-literature relevant to todays readers because the nineteenth century novel, when read jurisprudentially , abounds in representations of laws controlling concepts, many of which are still with us today. Rights, justice, laws 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 relationshipsindividual and collective, personal and politicalduring the nineteenth century, a period as much under the Rule of Law as the reign of Capital. So these novels pass judgementa novel judgementon the extent to which the nineteenth centurys idea of law is collusive with that eras 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 lexomenon: Towards a Novel Legal Theory of the Novel as Legal Theory 2. John Austin or Jane Austen? The Province of Jurisprudence DeterminedinPride and Prejudice 3.Jousting with Bentham: Utility, Morality and Ethics in Ivanhoes 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 Gables6. In Boz We Trust! Bleak Houses(Re)Imagination of Trusteeship.7: Two on a Guillotine? Courts and Crits in A Tale of Two Cities8. Bl³4