Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina offers a compelling narrative that serves as a framework for examining the evolution of family law, particularly in terms of marriage, divorce, and gender equality. The article adopts a qualitative, interdisciplinary approach that combines textual analysis with a comparison of contemporary legal regimes to track the evolution from a 19th-century model of immoveable patriarchal legal doctrine to a contemporary model emphasising personal agency and progressive reform. The analysis argues for the continuing relevance of literary narratives in shaping legal thought and also identifies some limitations of its methodological approach. Future studies should build on this framework and explore it in other literary texts and legal systems, enriching our understanding of the relationship between cultural narratives and emergent legal institutions. The findings highlight literature’s potential to tackle antiquated legal paradigms and catalyze meaningful reforms in jurisdictions around the world. For the purposes of analysis, modern legal science is restricted to the subcategory of Western systems based on the idea of rights, including such examples as the European Convention on Human Rights and the Council of Europe system, EU fundamental rights legislation, family law reform in England, and US constitutional family law jurisprudence. Therefore, there is no intention to analyse contemporary Russian family law, a separate field which may be interesting for comparative analysis in the future.
Giorgos Konstantakis (Wed,) studied this question.