I'm of course talking about the legal profession, rather than academics, in celebration of despatching a co-authored (with legal wizard Bill Orr) conference paper on Bram Stoker's 1897 Dracula as a legal text. (In referring to Mr Orr it is indeed a rarity to find someone who's such a pleasure to work with: analytically rigorous, witty, learned, patient.)
Dracula is a legal novel as much as it is an exposition of horror and virtue triumphant, a drama in which law and lawyers are as prominent as a tale by John Grisham or Dickens' Bleak House. It is permeated by references to law — the laws of man and the law of nature — along with depiction of characters who are either legal practitioners (for example Harker and Van Helsing), who have some familiarity with the law (for example Godalming and Dracula himself) or who deal with practitioners and legal documents.
From a contemporary perspective it features a foreign national who breached migration and phytosanitary law, engaged in theft and poisoning, committed trespass and false imprisonment, stalked and assaulted minors and adults, associated with the equivalent of an outlaw motorcycle gang and blithely ignored the traffic code. A group of vigilantes, uninhibited by their legal training, responded with offences such as unauthorised disinterment and interference with a corpse.
The paper uses characters such as the eponymous vampire and the fearless lawyer Van Helsing as a lens for understanding legal personhood, crime and responsibility in an age where anxieties about 'the alien' are proving to be as timeless as the undead gentleman from Transylvania.
Despite the passage of over 100 years most of the transgressions underlying Stoker's novel remain relevant. Assault, theft, threat and validity of contract are timeless, irrespective of whether there is an antimacassar or iPod in the vicinity. Anxieties about the permeability of borders, unauthorised imports of toxic substances (silver sand, white powder) or gangs (gypsies, Bandidos and Coffin Cheaters) are not new.
Some indeed may have a particular resonance for contemporary readers who have encountered questions about bioterrorism, genetic engineering (transducing genes from one species to another), culpability in the transmission of HIV, the determination of death (Dracula, although UnDead, meets criteria for liveness in for example the Transplantation & Anatomy Act 1979 (Qld)) or the rights of animals.
