Victorian England produced no stranger legal critic than Lewis Carroll. Across Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There; and The Hunting of the Snark, Carroll advances a critique of law’s claims to legitimacy, authority, and rationality, his satirical method exposing the contradictions Victorian legal culture struggled to acknowledge.

The dissertation begins with Alice, reading it as a historically grounded indictment of English criminal law. Through the Queen of Hearts’ capricious capital pronouncements, the Knave’s procedurally hollow trial, and the Mouse’s Tale’s predatory private prosecution, Carroll depicts a legal order whose authority rests on theatrical coercion rather than principled rule. Applying Lon Fuller’s account of law’s internal morality, Wonderland emerges not as a corrupted legal system but as a non-legal one in which sovereign command has displaced the conditions that make true governance possible.

The shift from Alice to Looking-Glass is one from the breakdown of sovereign authority to its structural opposite. The Looking-Glass enacts a nomoculture that disciplines subjects through classification, spatial constraint, temporal deferral, and linguistic sovereignty. Humpty Dumpty’s hermeneutic despotism, Hatta’s preemptive psychiatric detention, and Alice’s examination-as-coronation, viewed through Michel Foucault’s theory of disciplinary normalization, position Carroll as anticipating modern critiques of bureaucratic rationality.

This disciplinary order finds its endpoint in Snark’s “The Barrister’s Dream” and its examination of procedural futility. The pig’s trial, conducted without a competent advocate, before a prejudiced jury, and culminating in the sentencing of a long-dead defendant, testifies to a legal order that continues to operate on form alone. Together, the three texts trace law’s constitutive failures and locate their origins in the legal culture Carroll embedded in his best-known fiction.