Chapter 1 introduces students to the various approaches used to pursue comparative legal studies. It especially presents the orthodox “legal families“ approach to macro-comparative law. The chapter then considers several critiques of that tradition. H. Patrick Glenn challenges the concept of “legal families“ and suggests a “legal traditions” framework to replace it. The chapter then presents the social-contextual approach to comparative law as promoted by Legrand. Finally, the chapter urges students to recognize the ethical implications of comparative law through Frankenberg’s concepts of “distancing” and “differencing.”

In Chapter 6, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) are analysed in a pragmatic light. Although many have studied the age-old author–reader relationship in these two novels, rarely have the different pragmatic acts the author/narrator is performing in their address to the reader been highlighted. Studied within Warhol’s broader narratological distinctions between ‘distancing’ and ‘engaging’ narrators (1986, 1989, 1995), these addresses are re-placed within the theoretical model developed in Chapter 1 to enhance the difference between the two texts and show that other references of ‘you’ are present in a way never emphasised in studies of these novels (Brontë’s in particular).

Public health used to be enforced by the state, taking measures to isolate the ill and thus spare the community. Such traditional techniques involved a heavy sacrifice of individual liberties as citizens were inconvenienced and worse for the public good. In modern democracies, however, such heavy-handed methods could not continue. Public health therefore shifted its focus from the state imposing the needed behavioral changes on its subjects to citizens themselves voluntarily adopting the kind of conduct that was required to remain safe and healthy. Bacteriology and the increasing knowledge that some diseases were caused not by filth, but by microscopic organisms allowed public health authorities to target their preventive actions more precisely. It also allowed them to specify the kinds of behavioral prescriptions citizens had to follow to avoid spreading disease – not sneezing or coughing in public, avoiding needless physical and sexual contact, maintaining more general social distance, and the like. Citizens became increasingly responsible for their own well-being, learning how to behave to remain healthy.