Professor of Law
Faculty of Law
University of Leicester
University Road
Leicester
LE1 7RH
United Kingdom
[Click on the link above to see this paper's placement in the SCBtVS Program.]
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Images of law in BtVS resist easy analysis. Buffy has been seen as fulfilling “the promise of Foucault’s institutional apparatus” (M Buinicki and A Enns “Buffy the Vampire Disciplinarian: Institutional Excess and the New Economy of Power”(2001) 4 Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies). At the same time she and the Scooby Gang have been seen as being anarchists (K Topping “Slayer” (2002)). Buffy is the Slayer who says she is “the law” (“Selfless” 7005), yet earlier, in series 2, she has said to Giles “[y]ou’re the Watcher, I just work here” (“When She Was Bad” 2001). She works for institutions that seek to impose order and rules, the Watchers Council and the Initiative, but she leaves both (“Graduation Part 1” 3021; “The I in Team” 4013). Her reaction to law and legal authority as traditionally conceived is ambivalent. She resists arrest on several occasions (“Ted” 2011; “Bad Girls” 3014) yet reacts with horror to Dawn’s kleptomania (“Older and Far Away”, 6014). In this paper I will argue that BtVS produces a complex reading of the nature of law that shows increasing sophistication as the series progresses. Notions of autonomy are mixed with an awareness of the necessity for codes of behaviour and the interaction between the two is explored in a variety of ways. Concepts of law and authority are related to notions of family and love in a subtle fashion so as to cause us to rethink our ideas about issues as varied as the duty of obedience to the law to the relationship between anarchism and law. |