Probably the single work of English fiction most successfully portraying the functioning of law in society is the novel with the unlikely title Orley Farm (1862) by Anthony Trollope. This work does for the legal profession what his Barchester novels do for the clergy. The entire novel concerns a lawsuit over the signatures on two documents representing the will of a prosperous landowner, one of which his widow is accused of forging. Neither the lawyers who defend her nor those who accuse know whether she is guilty or innocent, and the reader also remains in doubt until the end of the novel. The advocates for the accused are drawn from two separate law firms representing moral arguments and the other on technicalities, half-truths, and histrionics. The law profession in Victorian England, Trollope’s portrayal of the two opposing legal types, and the efficacy of his attempt to combine literature and law will be discussed in this paper.

By late 1841 Charles Dickens had conquered most of the English-reading public on both sides of the Atlantic. Not very long after the news of Little Nell’s death in arrived to an eagerly awaiting public on American shores, Dickens himself made a pilgrimage to the Great Transatlantic Republic in the hope of viewing first-hand the improvement in an English-speaking country which had thrown off the shackles of Britain's class system, industrial poverty, and religious intolerance. He was largely disappointed. Dickens’ views on America are largely deductible from his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, and in his American Notes for General Circulation. The “for general circulation” tag already implies an ironic criticism of Dickens’ response to the American view that his works, and those of all British authors, were public property in America and that Dickens and his countrymen should be proud to be read in the United States on any terms. This was the American attitude until roughly this century. America’s own literary development suffered disastrousiy from the determined absence of copyright laws. One of the obvious results of the turn-of-the-century changes in America’s copyright law has been the emergence in this century of plentiful, vigorous, world-class American writing: This paper connects Dickens’ experience with the changes that have occurred in Taiwan over the past decade in regard to copyright law, points to similarities and differences between the two cases, and argues for a sane and reasonable copyright policy.

Law plays an ambiguous part in colonialism. Recent scholarship on colonialism shows that law is not only the justification of western imperialism (e.g. the maintenance of order), it is also a vital part of the colonial culture and practices. On the one hand it symbolizes the supremacy of westem civilization over oriental/barbarian culture. On the other it enters the daily life of the colonized and changed the local cultural and social structure. The semi-autonomous nature of law and its ideal of equality and justice, however, is in conflict with the exploitative and discriminative principle of colonialism. It therefore offers the colonized a space for anti-coloniai existence. By depicting the development of a legal case between the British and the Indian natives, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India illustrates the ambiguous and oftentimes self-contradictory role law plays in the coionial context.

This paper studies the literary representation of sex and law in two. intertextual novels: John Updike’s S. (1988) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850). Sarah Worth and Hester Prynne, respectively the heroine of S. and that of The Scarlet Letter, both rise against an oppressive marriage. Their rebellion takes the form of adultery, but with different consequences. Law accounts for the difference in their social reception. In the 17th-century puritan settlement in Boston, where the masterpiece by Hawthorne is set, law coordinates closely with morality in intervening in a highly emotional issue like adultery. It contrasts sharply with America in 1986, where S. has its setting. Adultery is no longer a crime in most of the states in the U.S.A. Law's detachment from private, emotional issues, as Weber obsrves, is a result of capitalism’s growing sophistication. In the words of Habermas, modern law is “uncoupled from ethical motives” and “the prelegal substratum of traditional morals.” Foucault's refusal to conceive of sex with the law arises from a perception of its growing gap with the workings of power. Gramsci prescribes its rescue by extending the concept of law to include activities in the domain of civil society. The different modes of law in pre-capitalist Boston and in America of the advanced capitalist stage shape the pattern of sex in these two novels. This leads to the conclusion that the context governed by law determines the form sex assumes.