Beginning in the early nineteenth century, American jurisprudence grappled with the issue of marital property. States under the Anglo-American legal tradition of common law revised marital property allocations to allow wives to hold certain categories of property separate from their husbands. These changes were enacted, in part, to insulate a wife’s property from the vagaries of the market but the judicial response reveals a larger narrative of ambivalence and anxiety about women, property, and the suggested mobility of separately held possessions. Marital property reform begins in an historical moment when the question of what a woman could own in marriage morphed into larger cultural anxieties such as the very meaning of ownership and “things” themselves in the face of new intangible properties. Writers of fiction also captured these anxieties, and created imagined scenarios of marriage and property to expose constructions of ownership, property, womanhood, and marriage. Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening attempts her withdrawal from her marriage by dismantling the Pontellier home and removing what she believes she owns to a separate physical space. The tragedy of her story can be understood for its legal impossibility under common law, as well as the restricted meanings of marriage and separate property under Louisiana’s civil law jurisdiction. At the end of Edith Wharton’s Summer, Charity Royall chooses to secretly reclaim a brooch that was a gift from her lover. Her action suggests a desire for privacy and could be viewed as fraudulent to her marriage vows. Pauline Hopkins’s character Hagar in Hagar’s Daughter repossesses material spaces which she was forbidden to own and control because of her race and gender, and uses the American justice system to support her claims to ownership and contractual rights. In contrast to Hopkins’s tenuous but nonetheless optimistic portrayal of contract, Marìa Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel Who Would Have Thought It? describes contract and the American legal system overall as empty promises. Marriage and property in Ruiz de Burton’s novel work as tropes through which to critique nineteenth-century American society and the destructive force of capitalism within its most intimate spaces.

Law / LL.D.

Law / LL.D.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-111).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, Graduate School of Arts and Science, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 444-467). Also available on the Internet.

This dissertation examines the varying roles of lawyers and judges in Canada, the United States, England, France and Germany in a selection of “fictional legal narratives”: novels, movies, television shows and plays that explore legal themes. The study focuses on contemporary works after 1960, and explores the North American fascination with lawyers that saturates the major levels of culture, from the popular (including television shows, movies and novels) to the academic. Fictional images of lawyers and judges not only reflect but arguably also influence our attitudes toward the legal system, and offer a concrete way of conceptualizing abstract legal concepts. However, the vast differences between the Anglo-American adversarial legal system and the continental European inquisitorial legal system spawn very different fictional portraits of lawyers and judges. The differences between fictional legal narratives produced by each country, even those with similarly structured legal systems, are also striking. Chapter One begins by outlining a number of factors that contribute to the proliferation of fictional legal narratives in some countries, and their relative scarcity in other countries. Next, Chapter Two traces the wide range of lawyer images in American fictional legal narratives, which both glamourize and demonize the figure of the lawyer. Turning to anthropomorphizations of law in the United Kingdom, Chapter Three examines the British tendency to perpetuate the idea that, if correctly executed, the fundamental principles of British law would lead to a just and harmonious society. Chapter Four then explores the “anxiety of influence” reflected in Canadian images of law, which are more “soft-boiled” than the fictional legal figures of other countries. Moving to French fictional legal narratives, Chapter Five contemplates the predominance of the juge d’instruction figure and the prevalence of the investigatory mode. The dissertation then discusses the relative scarcity of fictional legal narratives in Germany, and the cynicism in existing German stories about law in Chapter Six. The study concludes by considering the future directions of the law and culture movement, as well as both the challenges and rewards of this interdisciplinary work.

This dissertation examines the varying roles of lawyers and judges in Canada, the United States, England, France and Germany in a selection of “fictional legal narratives”: novels, movies, television shows and plays that explore legal themes. The study focuses on contemporary works after 1960, and explores the North American fascination with lawyers that saturates the major levels of culture, from the popular (including television shows, movies and novels) to the academic. Fictional images of lawyers and judges not only reflect but arguably also influence our attitudes toward the legal system, and offer a concrete way of conceptualizing abstract legal concepts. However, the vast differences between the Anglo-American adversarial legal system and the continental European inquisitorial legal system spawn very different fictional portraits of lawyers and judges. The differences between fictional legal narratives produced by each country, even those with similarly structured legal systems, are also striking. Chapter One begins by outlining a number of factors that contribute to the proliferation of fictional legal narratives in some countries, and their relative scarcity in other countries. Next, Chapter Two traces the wide range of lawyer images in American fictional legal narratives, which both glamourize and demonize the figure of the lawyer. Turning to anthropomorphizations of law in the United Kingdom, Chapter Three examines the British tendency to perpetuate the idea that, if correctly executed, the fundamental principles of British law would lead to a just and harmonious society. Chapter Four then explores the “anxiety of influence” reflected in Canadian images of law, which are more “soft-boiled” than the fictional legal figures of other countries. Moving to French fictional legal narratives, Chapter Five contemplates the predominance of the juge d’instruction figure and the prevalence of the investigatory mode. The dissertation then discusses the relative scarcity of fictional legal narratives in Germany, and the cynicism in existing German stories about law in Chapter Six. The study concludes by considering the future directions of the law and culture movement, as well as both the challenges and rewards of this interdisciplinary work.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Murdoch University, 2009. / Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts and Education. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 260-272)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1964. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--Columbia University, 1927. / Bibliography: p. 65.