The Legal Historian as Detective
Critical Analysis of Law, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2015
22 Pages Posted: 27 Jun 2019
Date Written: June 25, 2015
Abstract
Legal history is often depicted through evoking the metaphor of the magic mirror. This essay examines two series of detective novels by British author Sarah Caudwell and Israeli author Batya Gur which focus upon protagonists who themselves are legal historians and who deploy legal historical method. Caudwell’s sleuth, an Oxford scholar, seeks to uncover the details of crimes by using textual analysis. Gur’s detective, on the other hand, places homicides in their context and solves these murders by detecting those social norms which are so critical to a closed society that their violation might lead to violence. By using these novels themselves as a mirror it is possible to probe the promise and limitations of legal historical method. If, as the metaphor of the magic mirror suggests, law mirrors society, legal history serves as a looking glass for legal norms, and the fictional cosmos constructed by Caudwell and Gur reflects in its glass legal historical method, what can we learn about legal history as a narrative technology? And what happens when — as is the case in the last novels of both mystery series — the methods collapse, and neither the technic of text nor context adequately captures the complexity of the past?
Keywords: Legal History, Detective Novels, Narrative Technology
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