“Where the Shoe Pinches”: True Equity in Trollope’s The Warden
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Gary Watt
Gary Watt is a Professor of Law at The University of Warwick and co-founding editor of the journal
Law and Humanities . His monographs includeTrusts and Equity 7th ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2016);Shakespeare’s Acts of Will :Law, Testament and Properties of Performance (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016);Dress, Law and Naked Truth (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) andEquity Stirring (Oxford: Hart, 2009). He was named UK “Law Teacher of the Year” in 2009 and was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship (2010).
Abstract
Anthony’s Trollope’s short novel The Warden provides a rich and sophisticated case study in a wide range of equity jurisdictions. Some characters in the novel advance the notion that justice requires people to fulfil the duties of, and receive the benefits of, their ordained place in the social scheme. This notion has traditionally carried the name of equity when it refers, for example, to the divinely sanctioned, true succession of monarchs. Other parties in The Warden advance a notion that sometimes goes by the name of equity, but which is really a concern for social equality and distributive justice; it is a notion that often calls for received order to be disputed, disrupted and reformed. In The Warden, we also find equity understood as a legal right to wealth, or rather as a Chancery right to wealth which is based upon equitable notions of substantial justice rather than legal notions of formal entitlement. The titular character of the novel, Mr Septimus Harding, the warden of Hiram’s Hospital, searches, in the midst of all these arguments, for a “true equity” such “that he might sleep at night without pangs of conscience.” In this article, I argue that the “true equity” that Mr Harding seeks (and the equity that he demonstrates in the very act of seeking) is close to what Aristotle had in mind when he set out his idea of epieikeia in the Nicomachean Ethics, because it conceives equity to be an individual ethical response to the demands of a particular factual context. “True equity” is not an institutional jurisdiction; it is a quality of personal character.
About the author
Gary Watt is a Professor of Law at The University of Warwick and co-founding editor of the journal Law and Humanities. His monographs include Trusts and Equity 7th ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2016); Shakespeare’s Acts of Will: Law, Testament and Properties of Performance (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016); Dress, Law and Naked Truth (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) and Equity Stirring (Oxford: Hart, 2009). He was named UK “Law Teacher of the Year” in 2009 and was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship (2010).
©2016 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Equity and the Resources of Critique: Part I
- “Where the Shoe Pinches”: True Equity in Trollope’s The Warden
- Equity as a Question of Decorum and Manners: Conscience as Vision
- Millenaristic Equity. Theological Order and Legal Faith
- “… and if, in time, equity…”. An Exploration of the Time(s) of Equity Diagrammed through Image
- “From their Graves”: The Theme of Burial and the Work of the Modern Jurist in F. W. Maitland’s Equity also the Forms of Action at Common Law
- Research
- Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper: New Definitions of Human Dignity in Novel and Film
- Intertextuality and Parody of Law in The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien: a Literary and a Linguistic Reading
- Book Review
- Gary Watt: Shakespeare’s Acts of Will: Law, Testament and Properties of Performance
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Equity and the Resources of Critique: Part I
- “Where the Shoe Pinches”: True Equity in Trollope’s The Warden
- Equity as a Question of Decorum and Manners: Conscience as Vision
- Millenaristic Equity. Theological Order and Legal Faith
- “… and if, in time, equity…”. An Exploration of the Time(s) of Equity Diagrammed through Image
- “From their Graves”: The Theme of Burial and the Work of the Modern Jurist in F. W. Maitland’s Equity also the Forms of Action at Common Law
- Research
- Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper: New Definitions of Human Dignity in Novel and Film
- Intertextuality and Parody of Law in The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien: a Literary and a Linguistic Reading
- Book Review
- Gary Watt: Shakespeare’s Acts of Will: Law, Testament and Properties of Performance
