The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises (review)

Abstract

According to Theodore Ziolkowski, the Western legal system has developed through a succession of historical crises, each precipitated by a need to realign the forces of law and morality in the face of new injustices within the institution of the law. Since the search for social justice is an abiding theme in great works of literature, the emergence of major literary figures at critical moments in the evolution of Western law is thus hardly coincidental: "It is at those moments when the tension between law and morality is increased to the breaking point that the law is changed and its evolution lurches forward again. And it is precisely those epoch-making moments that great literature reflects" (16). Baldly stated, this thesis might reasonably be felt to be naive and reductive, a kind of crude legal Darwinianism used to justify an otherwise rather arbitrary selection of works, but such an objection would seriously undervalue this wide ranging, scholarly, and penetrating study. Thankfully, Ziolkowski has written a book that does not in the final analysis depend for its effect on the promulgation of a grand theory; in fact, The Mirror of Justice is at its most successful where the central argument retreats into the background, providing little more than a convenient peg on which to hang a [End Page 189] series of highly stimulating discussions of literary works concerned with the law.