Title: Common precedents
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.
Subjects: Judicial process, Literature and society, Social change in literature, History and criticism, English fiction, Social conditions, Stare decisis, History, English fiction, history and criticism, 19th century, Judicial process, great britain, Great britain, social conditions
Places: Great Britain, England
Time periods: 19th century