LAW & LITERATURE WORKSHOP SERIES

presents

Ayelet Ben-Yishai
University of Haifa

Give Me a Precedent: 
Past, Present and Future in Victorian Fiction and Law

Tuesday, April 8, 2008
12:30 - 2:00
Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
Solarium (room FA2)

The notion of precedent has been central not only to the development of the common law, but also to fostering and maintaining a British sense of identity and community over time.  This talk combines close readings of Geroge Eliot's 1872 Middlemarch with a brief historical and formal analysis of Victorian law reports, arguing that the doctrine of legal precedent, itself undergoing major changes in the nineteenth century, developed as a structure particularly suited for anticipating a future while remaining contiguous with the past.  Moeover, I show that this precedential structure was also that of Victorian fiction.  Reading Middlemarch in light of theories of legal precedent thus presents a new way of thinking about "the new," both historical and novelistic; it also illuminates the construction of fiction as a truth-bearing narrative.

Ayelet Ben-Yishai is a lecturer of English Literature at the University of Haifa, Israel.  She holds a law degree (LL.B.) from the Hebrew University and a Ph.D. in comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.  Some of her work on the Victorian novel in its legal culture has appeared in the Journal of Law, Culture, and the Humanities and Nineteenth-Century Literature.

A light lunch will be served.

For more workshop information, please contact Professor Simon Stern at simon.stern@utoronto.ca or Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca