Volume 13, Issue 2 -

In the Victorian age, a period of rapid changes and social and cultural advancement, the preoccupation with modernizing the law system emerged as a concern for both law experts and ordinary people. However, it was the realist novel that drew particular attention to the inadequacy and inefficiency of a system that needed to be reformed. Charles Dickens was the Victorian novelist who, more than any of his fellow writers, never missed the opportunity to speak of law and justice, allowing his experience in the field to reveal the oddities and idiosyncrasies of the legal system. In David Copperfield , Dickens unmercifully criticizes laws and legal procedures but at the same time he proposes changes. In the middle of the century, the laws on marriage and divorce were frequently debated in the press and in Parliament. Dickens chooses his most autobiographical novel to give his own view on those matters as well as on the necessity to reform law courts at large.

Despite the little critical attention it has received, Lady Anna is exemplary in Trollope’s output as a novel in which contemporary ideas of Englishness, gentlemanliness and the law are not only questioned, but also complicated and conflated in various ways. Whereas the majority of scholars have focused their analyses on the legal intricacies of the dispute involving Lady Anna and occasionally on the reflection on true gentlemanliness, which indeed is the central concern of the novel (most often simply to ascertain whether the son of a tailor could be a gentleman or not), the present contribution intends to re-assess the paradigms of masculinities embodied by the male protagonists of Trollope’s novel, and to verify to what extent the gentlemanly status can also be granted to the law’s representatives, in particular to the Solicitor-General Sir William Patterson in both his private and public roles. The various and opposite criteria adopted by the different characters to judge and define a gentleman mirror the epistemological changes that had been re-shaping the debate on its figure, thus disclosing a social texture in which old and new notions of gentlemanliness co-existed.

Starting from an analysis of realism as expressed by George Eliot in Chapter 17 of Adam Bede , this paper intends to investigate the way in which law is enforced in a case of infanticide. In particular, in Eliot’s novel the crime is committed by the beautiful and naive Hetty Sorrel whose tragic destiny is a consequence of her seduction by the aristocratic Arthur Donnithorne. Hence her condition of a fallen woman and, accordingly, the trial culminating in the sentencing to hanging. Significantly, Hetty’s silence before the jury in the courtroom is interrupted thanks to the intervention of Dinah Morris, her Methodist cousin who, meeting the prisoner in solidarity and sympathy, will have from her a full confession of the events.

From the point of view of the British juridical system, The Law and the Lady can be interpreted as a sensation novel whose crucial albeit indirect message must be read in the context of Collins’s legal reformism. As well as challenging the Scottish verdict of Not Proven, the heroine of the novel, Valeria Brinton, presents herself as a woman detective who is anxious to prove her husband’s innocence before both the court and public opinion. Underlining the peculiarity of her mission is a destabilising tension which, in its social implication, is aimed to challenge the conformism and love of orthodoxy typical of the Victorian ethos. In this sense, Valeria’s gendered autobiographical writing, while giving full evidence to her resourceful womanhood, dramatises the blurring of the confine between masculinity and femininity and, at the same time, offers a representation of the old-fashioned and abstruse protocols of British law.

Given their love for Italy, which often represented for them a second home country, it was not unusual for late-Victorian writers and intellectuals to have direct experiences with Italian laws. The article presents four “case studies” of late-Victorian authors living in Italy and analyses their reactions to such diverse issues as homosexuality, madness and artistic heritage in relation to the Italian law system and by providing a comparative perspective with English legislation. The contribution also considers these authors’ narratives of their responses to Italian laws in both published and private writings that cover a variety of genres and evidence cultural differences and conflicts, though not always in an expected way.

Over the last few decades, the field of law and literature studies has increasingly focused on the importance of literary texts in the interpretation of legal doctrines developing wider perspectives on society and on the law’s effect on the community itself. By considering the dynamic relationship between narrative works and legal documents, the present analysis proposes a reading of Joseph Conrad’s short story “Amy Foster” (1901), which focusses on the investigation of the social and political aspects of migration in late nineteenth-century Britain. Echoes of the migrant figure as represented in Conrad’s story can be found in the Aliens Act, the law passed by the British government in 1905 to regulate the flux of migrants from Eastern Europe. Taking into account the legal value of the Aliens Act and the social consequences of its application, the article will first examine general views on migration at the beginning of the twentieth century, and will later explore the language used in the statute and its relevance in the short story. To this end, the notion of “undesirable immigrant,” first introduced to describe migrants with well-defined characteristics, is anticipated by Joseph Conrad in “Amy Foster” whose protagonist, Yanko Goorall, is an emigrant from Eastern Europe. Conrad’s fictional representation of Goorall as an “undesirable immigrant” allows us to reflect on how his writing deals with (and anticipates) events and socio-cultural trends.

This paper focusses on the spreading of robotics, starting from a Resolution of the European Parliament of 2017. Legal scholarship seems to have developed an attraction for digitalisation, which implies the development of smart working and platform work governed by algorithms. The pervading impact of robotics seems to imply fewer divergences from the traditional structure of Labour Law in terms of institutions and legal categories. However, it could determine even more radical changes, possibly approaching scenarios explored so far only by science fiction.

The article focuses on the epistemological paradigms that underpin the current trends in comparative legal research, by assessing them within the framework of the law-and-literature movement. In particular, it examines the scientific state of mind and the veering towards quantitative approaches which now percolate through legal comparative studies. The article argues that such state of mind is not merely confined to the ambit of comparative law. It has indeed several traits in common with the scientific mentality which has been saturating the knowledge system in Western culture since the seventeenth century. This scientific state of mind was one of Jonathan Swift’s main targets. In Gulliver’s Travels , A Tale of a Tub , and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit , Swift satirised the seventeenth-century scientific program, which had reduced the advancement of knowledge into a system that is very similar to twenty-first century information systems. This reduction was influenced by Cartesian philosophy and was achieved through methodological innovation. But it was also a consequence of the debate on ancient and modern learning , which had originated in France, but had immediate resonance in England. Swift rejected absolute reliance on quantitative methods: not only does this make it possible to set an equation between law and literature, but it also allows us to bring humanities into the debate about quantification in comparative law – and, as a consequence, to reappraise through literature some common assumptions we usually make about the law.

The informality of the Homeric assembly is often emphasised to distinguish it from the democratic bodies of the classical polis , and to show that the people in the Homeric society had no means to qualify the power of their aristocratic leaders. This article argues, to the contrary, that the lack of a formal system of command and control in the Homeric society conditioned the dependence of the leaders on a political model of persuasion. Since this was necessarily directed at the mass population of the society, they people were integrated in the system of government. This was maintained through three general mechanisms: first, the voice of the people was institutionalised, in the form of a popular assembly, the agorē ; second, the people had a standardised, effective means by which to express consent and a limited amount of dissent to their leaders in the assembly; third, the people participated in a juridical function which was communal in purpose and form. This model seeks to show that, in these ways, the voice of the people held an important position in the structure of power, one which depended on the informality of that structure rather than being reduced by it.

In the recent past Elizabeth Tudor’s rhetorical charisma has raised an ever-increasing interest within the academic domain. The scope of this paper is to examine the queen’s abilities to persuade and captivate her subjects, as well as her diplomatic attitudes and magniloquence; in pursuing this aim, great attention will be given to the most remarkable speeches she gave before the dignitaries of the royal crown and the English militancy, with particular regard to those rhetorical skills she learnt to master and sharpen over the years. Since the political matter was, to her, an expression of ‘inwardness,’ Elizabeth’s way of ruling has always reflected her personal vicissitudes. Looking at her public speeches with a discerning eye means probing her mind quite consciously and attempting to identify with one of the greatest sovereigns whose mark on the sixteenth century European scene remains indelible.