The Mirror of Justice

Literary Reflections of Legal Crises

Theodore Ziolkowski

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780691114705
  9780691026831
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691187747
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Legal History
• Index: Law

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE: Introduction
• CHAPTER TWO: The Birth of Justice from the Spirit of Tragedy
• CHAPTER THREE: The Ambivalence toward Pagan Law
• CHAPTER FOUR: The Role of Rome
• CHAPTER FIVE: The Disenchantment with Customary Law
• CHAPTER SIX: The Reception of Roman Law in Germany
• CHAPTER SEVEN: European Variations
• CHAPTER EIGHT: Law and Equity I
• CHAPTER NINE: Law and Equity II
• CHAPTER TEN: The Attractions of Codification
• CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Modern Crisis of Law
• CHAPTER TWELVE: Twentieth-Century Legal Evolutions
• NOTES
• INDEX