Introduction: common precedents -- pt. 1. The forms of legal precedent -- Stare decisis and the history of legal precedent -- Law reports: form and function -- Anti-narrativity -- Anti-narrativity and the history of law reporting -- pt. 2. Precedential forms of fiction -- precedential reasoning: George Eliot's Middlemarch -- Empirical customs: heirlooms and facts in Trollope's Eustace diamonds -- Past perfect: legitimacy and the Woman in white
Summary
Examining legislative reform in the mid-Victorian period Ben-Yishai argues that precedential reasoning as a strategy for managing change produced innovations in legal and fictional writing simultaneously and in a mutually constitutive manner
