Fairy Tales and the Law

East Tower 

Despite prominent historical linkages, very little literature exists examining the relationship between legal orders and fairy tales. Before creating the modern fairy tale, Charles Perrault went to law school, a path also followed by both Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who went on to publish what remain the most popular versions of European fairy tales today.
Existing literature has highlighted resonances between fairy tales as a genre and the structure of a case, especially under the common law, but has failed to demonstrate how either form may help us better understand the other.
To fill this gap, this paper does two things. First, it systematically describes the question. There are a variety of ways in which fairy tales, and distinct cultural traditions of fairy tales, can be compared to different elements of legal orders. While only a few avenues can be adequately pursued in a single paper, the limited existing literature lacks a structured way of thinking about the question. In attempting to provide such a structure, this work engages with the ongoing discussion on what "law and literature" is meant to do, and how best to pursue it.
Second, by examining both classic and lesser-known fairy tales, this paper argues that the two forms of discourse share a few fundamental similarities. The role of magic as an element of the fictional world which must be "bought into" by the reader to be effective, highlights the manner in which legal discourse likewise creates its own 'secondary world' in which the rules of the world are different. Causation in law differs from causation in fact, for instance, and a consistent, believable conception of legal causation is what allows for the suspension of disbelief, thus making the legal world 'real'. After these similarities are developed, the paper argues that law's 'magical' nature is both a curse and a blessing, since it serves both to hide the fact that law is socially created and enables us to create powerful normative systems.