Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2003. / Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 258 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-258). Abstract available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2008 July 29.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Virginia, 1930. / Without thesis note. "Published on the fund established in memory of Ganson Goodyear Depew." "Miscellaneous plays": p. 153-156; Bibliography: p. [183]-187.

Inaug.-Diss.--Munich. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 90-96.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Virginia, 1930. / Without thesis note. "Published on the fund established in memory of Ganson Goodyear Depew." "Miscellaneous plays": p. 153-156; Bibliography: p. [183]-187.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisor: Madeline Sutherland-Meier. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

abstract: For over a century, writings in the Law & Literature genre have been largely restricted to works concerning lawyers and courtrooms. This despite early preeminent Law& Literature scholars' assertions that the genre should incorporate any writing that examines the intersection of law, crime, morality, and society. For over a half-century, Detroit novelist Elmore Leonard has been producing well-written, introspective novels about criminals, violence, and society's need to both understand and condemn these things, all under the broad, oft-marginalized genre of crime and detective fiction. This paper pairs the work of Elmore Leonard, using his successful novel Out of Sight as a stylistic framework, with the Law & Literature genre. After a dissection of the true definition of a Law & Literature and detective fiction, as well as an excavation of underlying themes and imports of Out of Sight, it is found that Law & Literature scholars need to be more inclusive of crime novels like Leonard's. And, given the characteristics of both genres, Leonard's novels are more appropriately classified as Law & Literature rather than detective fiction. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. English 2012

Historically, legal records were the main focus of archival preservation, and archives served primarily as arsenals of law—instruments for control and management of the State. Today, archives have many different values and uses, and legal value is only one criterion considered during the archival appraisal process. It is an important criterion, though, since archivists have an obligation to preserve not only those documents needed to understand society and its culture, but also those required to protect the rights and interests of society, its institutions, its citizens, and its heirs. Unfortunately, little has been written in the archival literature about what constitutes documentary legal value nor how this value can be recognized and evaluated. This thesis draws on literature from archival science, sociology, records management, diplomatics, law, and jurisprudence in order to define legal value and to identify its components. Since the study focuses on North American archives, the legal literature consulted pertains to the English legal system and its particular manifestations in the United States and Canada. To begin with, the thesis examines the document-event relationship and the relationship of this unit to a society's juridical system. This analysis illustrates the functions that documents play in society, and aims to provide an understanding of the capacity of documents to protect society and to serve as legal evidence. It is then proposed that the presence of a relationship between a document and a juridical event (one in which the society's legal system has an interest) be considered the first component of legal value. Perhaps the most important and most useful of the documents having relevance to events with legal significance is the class identified in this thesis as "legal records," consisting of those documents that execute or constitute written evidence of acts and events which directly affect legal rights and duties. Exploring the first component further, the thesis makes a distinction between actual and potential legal value based on whether the relationship of the document to a juridical event is direct or indirect, and whether the event currently has juridical relevance. Determining the strength of potential legal value involves consideration of the second and third components of legal value, which are related to the use of documents as legal evidence. These two components are admissibility and weight (in the sense of a document's effectiveness as a representation of facts). External factors, such as retention regulations, may play a role in determining this aspect of legal value, and some of these factors are discussed. More often though, the archivist will need to search for indications of reliability and completeness in the documentary formation process and in the elements of form intrinsic to a type of document. The thesis identifies many of the internal factors that contribute to legal value and proposes some criteria and a methodology for appraisal of legal value. Appraisal of legal value is not a mysterious process. With the exception of some diplomatic analysis, much of the information and analysis needed to determine legal value is fundamental to any appraisal process. In a society governed by law in all its aspects, determining legal value is a central part of any archival appraisal. / Arts, Faculty of / Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS), School of / Graduate

This dissertation explores the relationship between the ‘rise’ of the British novel and the critical changes happening in contemporary English marriage law from early eighteenth-century to the end of the nineteenth-century. While citing landmark legal treatises and acts and positioning these novels as the medium through which to see the way these legal moments significantly shaped British culture and society, equity is ultimately at the heart of this study, with equity functioning as part of law but a corrective to it. Running parallel to this protocol of reading through equity is a reading informed through moral philosophy, drawn predominantly from the work of Adam Smith and other thinkers from the Scottish Enlightenment. They encourage us to think about obligation, and the relationship between intentions, expectations, and consequences on the point of promise and contract. Beginning with Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), I show the moral and legal difficulties that arise when promises are based purely on verbal contracts. I then move to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Pamela in Her Exalted Condition (1741) to address the importance and utility of contract, but also the need to outline and endorse a system—introduced through Hardwicke’s Act (1753)—that would provide a more reliable structure for the marriage narrative. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria (1798) and Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), both of which I call historical novels, pinpoint legal structures that are both oppressive and obsolete, and those who fall victim to the insufficient common law require a more equitable judgment. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) encourages readers to think about the potency behind intentions, both expressed and implied, and how resulting consequences can often run counter to the original intentions and expectations. I posit each text as a ‘case’ warranting treatment and judgment in a court of equity, where the particular details are judged in and of themselves but then stand as an offering for ways to continue to think about the general pattern and evaluation of human nature and morals. / English

This thesis argues that the popularity of the clandestine marriage plot in English and Spanish drama following the Reformation corresponds closely to developments and emerging conflicts in European matrimonial law. My title, ‘casos de honra,' or ‘honour cases', unites law and drama in a way that captures this argument. Taken from the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega's El arte nuevo (1609), a treatise on his dramatic practice, the phrase has been understood as a description of the honour plots so common in Spanish Golden Age drama, but ‘casos' [cases] has a further, and related, legal meaning. Casos de honra are cases touching honour, whether portrayed on stage or at law, a European rather than a strictly Spanish phenomenon, and clandestine marriages are one such example. I trace the genealogy of three casos de honra from their recognisable origins in Italian novelle, through Italian, French, Spanish, and English adaptations, until their final early modern manifestations on the English and Spanish stage. Their seeming differences, and often radical divergences in plot can be explained with reference to their distinct, but related, legal concerns.

In the twenty-first century, as in the sixteenth, a blindfolded woman holding a sword and scales personifies justice; her blindfold conveys impartiality, her scales evenhandedness, and her sword the authority to compel obedience. In pre-democratic early modern England, Justice’s iconography was often used to legitimate the pain that the state imposed on those who broke the common peace. Simultaneously, the creative and cultural narratives within which the penal code was embedded often complicated and contradicted the state’s legally violent precepts. The relationship between legal violence and justice is at the center of this project: Must the law be violent to control violence? Does the law’s violence promote justice or disrupt it? How do the formal mechanisms of law and social control operate within the complex world of art, sermons, and literature? This project maps the late Elizabethan and early Stuart engagement with those questions. I examine a continuum of responses to legal violence embedded in the judicial institutions of Parliament, the Star Chamber, and the Queen’s Bench as well as in poetry, plays, sermons, broadsides, iconography, utopian narratives, paintings, and engravings. Often drawing on the metaphoric force of Justice’s symbols, the early modern response to legal violence was not purely semantic but strongly aesthetic, defending, mediating, reflecting, and refracting the state’s formal mechanisms of law. Reading case law along with works by Thomas More, Elizabeth I, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Edward Coke, John Donne, George Herbert, Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish, I trace law as a cultural practice, expressed and understood aesthetically through both codified and creative means.