`It's About Power': Law in the Fictional Setting of a Quaker Meeting and in the Everyday Reality of `Buffy the Vampire Slayer'

The relationship between law and violence is one that is long-established. Robert Cover's scholarship suggests an ineluctable relationship between law and violence except in "imaginary worlds." This essay explores the possibilities of a law without violence in worlds that are not imaginary. It looks at two separate sites. First, drawing primarily on ethnographic data, it examines the life of a religious group, a Quaker Meeting, showing how Quaker law dominates the world of the Meeting. Quaker law, the essay argues, is a law that lacks the violence that is associated with state law. However, the essay goes on to argue, though Quaker law is real for the members of Meeting, it depends on propositions about human nature that almost all non-Quakers would reject, thus meaning that the Meeting is, for most people, based on a fiction. Secondly the essay looks at the world of the television series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," The essay argues that the relationship that Buffy and her friends establish is one founded on their own law; again a law that is not based on violence. The essay concludes that the law that Buffy and her friends create is one that everyone can adhere to.