Good and Evil in Art and Law: An Extended Essay

People complain about our system of justice and how it deals with villains. If it is not the government complaining about how lenient judges are, it is the Press whining about inadequately punished rapists or the premature release of prisoners. There are also frequent calls for more criminals to be committed to prison and predictions of an apocalypse if the law continues to strive for balanced solutions. This is an interdisciplinary essay. It looks at art and especially literature in juxtaposition with law and speculates how the two disciplines approach, in their separate but inter-related ways, the notions of "good" and "evil". Full of detail, it examines how the two disciplines deal with these notions, why the evil-doer is often agrandicized in literature but is base in real life and how good and evil change with time. Though one discipline cannot influence the reasoning process of the other, this book, addressed to the general educated reader, is a plea for a broader humanistic education.