Common precedents
Subtitle: the presentness of the past in Victorian law and fiction
By: Ayelet Ben-Yishai
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 191
ISBN-13: 9780199937646; 9780199937653
Subjects: Judicial process; Literature and society; Social change in literature; History and criticism; English fiction; Social conditions; Stare decisis; History
Description: "Common Precedents maintains that precedent constitutes a sophisticated and powerful mechanism for managing social and cultural change. Reading major novels by George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Wilkie Collins, this analysis of law and literature shows that precedential reasoning enjoyed widespread cultural significance in the nineteenth-century as a means of preserving a sense of common history, values, and interests in the face of a new heterogeneous society. An in-depth analysis of Victorian law reports argues that precedential reasoning enables the recognition of the new and its assimilation as part of a continuous past. The binding force of precedent, which ties judges to decisions made by their predecessors, also functions as the binding element of an always shifting commonality, pulling it together in the face of rupture and dispersion." -- Publisher's description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: common precedents; title: Pt. 1. The forms of legal precedent; title: Stare decisis and the history of legal precedent; title: Law reports: form and function; title: Anti-narrativity; title: Anti-narrativity and the history of law reporting; title: Pt. 2. Precedential forms of fiction; title: precedential reasoning: George Eliot's Middlemarch; title: Empirical customs: heirlooms and facts in Trollope's Eustace diamonds; title: Past perfect: legitimacy and the Woman in white.