23rd December 2022
Yesterday this blog asked for your favourite fictional lawyers – and why.
There were some splendid replies – some old favourites, some new (at least to me) and fascinating-sounding.
As I am on holiday, I will not write a long post in response to those questions, but I would like to perhaps surprise you with who are my two favourite fictional writers about law.
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The first is the Master herself, Jane Austen.
(Yes, I am an absolute Janeite and I see her as the greatest writer in the language, but that is for another day.)
What Austen does about law is so deft and clever you hardly notice she is doing it.
With a sentence, or even a word, she can describe and convey the sophisticated and elaborate legal relationships of the landed gentry and lower aristocracy of her time.
Take these examples from Pride and Prejudice:
“Mr. Bennett’s property consisted almost entirely in an estate of two thousand a year, which, unfortunately for his daughters, was entailed, in default of heirs male, on a distant relation; and their mother’s fortune, though ample for her situation in life, could but ill supply the deficiency of his. Her father had been an attorney in Meryton, and had left her four thousand pounds. […]
“When first Mr. Bennet had married, economy was held to be perfectly useless; for, of course, they were to have a son. This son was to join in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age, and the widow and younger children would by that means be provided for.”
There are property lawyers of great seniority and experience who would not come anywhere near being able to explain an entail (or anything else) as straightforwardly.
And Austen does it with what looks like a flick of her pen.
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The other writer was a lawyer himself, though this is not widely known.
Indeed, many literary reference books where they mention his day-job at all describe him merely as an insurance clerk.
In fact he was, in effect, a personal injury lawyer, investigating and assessing industrial accidents for the state insurance scheme.
Perhaps because of this he was able to describe the world of law and bureaucracy so brilliantly and scathingly (and chillingly) in his novels and short stories.
That writer is, of course, Franz Kafka.
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What fictional writers about the law do you most admire? And why?
Please add your reply below.
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Jane Austen! I too think her the greatest writer in the English language. I nearly mentioned her before but fell short.
You’re on holiday?
Well, Happy Holidays!
And thank you for another year of interesting reading.
(And should it be possible, could you ‘contribute’ a bit more as contributing editor to the ft – they sorely need you).
Really, THANKS.
Dickens surely for giving us not just the best description of the legal system of chancery in Jarndyce v Jarndyce but for his crusading zeal against the way in which the English common law can be manipulated by its practitioners to oppress those foolish or unfortunate enough to get caught in the rollers, like Miss Flite and Mr Gridley. My own experience of litigation suggests little has changed.
If we are talking about writers of crime fiction then I submit Nicolas Freeling through whose characters Piet Van der Valk, Arlette Van der Valk, Henri Castang and Vera Castang, I have learnt a lot about the criminal justice systems of at least three European nations.
Merry Christmas!
Shakespeare’s plays are immersed in law, with many holding trial scenes and employing legal terms, such as distrain, chattels, dower, letters patent, negotiate, compromise, circumstantial, and concepts such as equity, governance, the nature and transfer of power, inheritance, and contracts. Measure for Measure deals with the struggle on how to apply the law, harshly or with a lighter hand. Angelo, when standing in for the Duke, condemns a man to death for getting his girlfriend pregnant outside marriage and argues, “We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape, till custom make it
Their perch and not their terror.
. . .
Sir, he must die”.
The Merchant of Venice deals with the legal nicety of whether one can take a pound of flesh without damaging the body from which it is taken.
In the graveyard scene, Hamlet shows familiarity with the law: “Why, may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillities, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? Why does he suffer this mad knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery? Hum! This fellow might be in’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries: is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? Will his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double ones too, than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The very conveyances of his lands will scarcely lie in this box; and must the inheritor himself have no more, ha?”
Very Happy Holidays and thank you so much for keeping me thinking!
Austen? You do surprise me!
I’m currently revisiting my family history research, and am wading through 1620-1721 territory on 3 direct lines, reading a lot about the Catholic Forfeitures during the English Revolution, and original documents showing how my family lost estates which now comprise the northern suburbs of Liverpool.
Where Austen comes into play, is in the reading of these and the text of Marriage Bonds from that era. Without being familiar with Austen, particularly Pride and Prejudice, I’d struggle to make sense of them.
A find delighted me the other day, an original baptism record immediately above the one I’d been searching for, with a child by the glorious name of Dulcibella Brownbill, born in 1771 in Liverpool. If ever a name was straight out of Austen, that was it! I’ll be saving that name for our next cat.
I never knew Kafka was a lawyer. We studied a couple short stories in my German language class.
My other half is a recent convert to Steve Cavanagh’s Eddie Flynn novels. Cavanagh claims to have “studied law by accident”.
Dulcibella Brownbill is wasted on a cat. Get a parrot.
And “Dulcibella Brownbill” would be typical of Dickens but not at all Austen!
A P Herbert, of course. I grew up with ”Uncommon Law” and ”Misleading Cases”. By no means all of these is given over to his crusading for reform of divorce law.
Two short comments: First of all I’d like to thank you for your great writing throughout the year and wish you and your loved ones a wonderful Christmas.
Second, I am not of a legal persuasion but I really like a good crime or detective story. Yesterday someone mentioned William McIntyre, which was a writer which I had not come across. I am looking forward to listen/read some of the stories. Thank you.
Franz Kafka was an unwilling lawyer…. his father forced him to read law when young Franz actually wanted to do philosophy. much in his life circled around society forcing him down a certain path (ie a marriage for sake of stability and status – dissolved later) and he resenting and writing of his resentment? he died at 41 years. what a loss of a great mind.
How about John Grisham for a modern US example?