Title: A Funhouse Mirror of Law: The Entailment in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
Abstract: The relationship between a society and its law is inexact. Despite repeated claims that law mirrors societal norms and values, no scholar has punctured that balloon of an idea better than Alan Watson. In his groundbreaking Legal Transplants and many subsequent works, Alan has demonstrated the many disjunctures between law and society. Alan has devoted a large part of his impressive corpus of scholarship on legal development to expand on this idea, and he has convincingly demonstrated that legal development often occurs through borrowing and accident as much as deliberate societal decision. For example, Alan has painstakingly traced how the dictates and opinions of the ancient Roman jurists, who were pagans, were incorporated into Justinian’s Digest, which was produced by a committee at the direction of a Christian emperor living in Byzantium. Roman law, and particularly the Digest, in turn, was later rediscovered and became the most influential source of law for continental Europe. In a more contemporary example, Alan has shown how the civil code for Turkey—which by that point had become a secular country with a largely Islamicpopulation—essentially lifted the Swiss civil code (which itself was based on
the earlier principles of Roman law) for its contents.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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