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Jane Austen, Law Professor, on Bar Prep: Four Stress-free Lessons on Estates in Land and Family Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2025
Abstract
Upon the occasion of the 250th birthday of Jane Austen, let us learn how to ace a bar exam from Professor Jane Austen. Yes, that’s right, because Austen readers unwittingly learn law and legal principles surrounding several areas of law, but particularly in family law and wills and estates. Basic rules from these areas of law seem to appear in every one of Austen’s novels, offered with a savory richness of understanding of not only their importance but also their complexity.
This brief essay reviews basic legal rules and legal analysis by efficiently using fact patterns from four of our professor’s novels: Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. By applying the standard IRAC (Issue, Rule, Analysis, and Conclusion) method of legal reasoning to each, this essay undeniably endeavors to teach admirable bar preparation. General rules of American law are applied throughout, although legal rules and principles of Regency England that have a precise bearing on the fact pattern are explained as well. Can there be any more amusing way to prepare for the bar exam? One hardly knows.
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References
1 Jane Austen was born Dec. 16, 1775. Britannica, “Jane Austen, Novelist,” accessed Aug. 25, 2025, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jane-Austen.
2 Kohm, Lynne Marie and Akers, Kathleen E., Law and Economics in Jane Austen (Lexington, 2019), 15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 15. Tracing the principles of law and economics in sex, marriage, and romance as set in Austen’s novels, this book unveils how those meticulous principles still control today’s modern romance, while unwittingly permitting readers new insights into law and economics.
4 IRAC stands for Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion. “The IRAC Method,” Law School Survival: Conquer Law School and the Bar Exam, accessed Aug. 5, 2025, https://www.lawschoolsurvival.org/content/irac-method.
5 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814), Ch. 11.
6 Austen, Mansfield Park, Chs. 9 and 10.
7 “real property: real property (land law): an overview,” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed Aug. 5, 2025, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/Real_property.
8 “personal property,” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed Aug. 5, 2025, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/personal_property.
9 Austen, Mansfield Park, Ch. 10.
10 These items are often referred to as “chattel.” See “personal property,” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed Aug. 5, 2025.
11 See, e.g., Internal Revenue Code 4.48.6, Real Property Valuation Guidelines (2025), https://www.irs.gov/irm/part4/irm_04-048-006.
12 See, e.g., Internal Revenue Code 4.25.12 (2025), https://www.irs.gov/irm/part4/irm_04-025-012, for valuation assistance.
13 “How the Window Tax Changed the Architecture of the 18th Century,” Histories of the Unexpected, Sep. 10, 2019, https://historiesoftheunexpected.com/magazine/the-window-tax/.
The window tax worked as a non-invasive tax that attempted to evaluate the wealth of the occupant(s). […] The work of the window tax is crucial in the history of centralized government, for it allowed taxation of homeowners based upon their wealth and social status. […] [I]t was the starting point [from] which parliament could create a property tax. Ibid. (noting that the tax was finally repealed in 1851). See also “Window Tax,” National Archives, UK.gov, accessed Aug. 5, 2025, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/georgian-britain-age-modernity/window-tax/.
14 “situs,” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed Aug. 5, 2025, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/situs.
15 “Due Process and Personal Jurisdiction,” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed Aug. 5, 2025, https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-5/due-process-and-personal-jurisdiction-doctrine-and-practice.
16 Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 10. Here, we discuss the economic aspects of Austen’s work, proffering that law and economics are a consistent and constant underpinning of all her scenarios, with even Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” evident throughout. Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 8.
Ostensibly led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of any original intention, each estate in an Austen narrative is a little economy unto itself, while also quietly contributing to a larger economy promoting the public interests. Jane Austen not only understood that the invisible hand of economic incentives directs these realities of home economics, but she also uses them to provide the colorful framework for romance, love, and life. Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 9.
17 One University College of London English professor writes that only two people actually die in Austen’s complete works. “There are only two deaths that occur within Jane Austen’s novels, and one of these is of a character whom we never meet. The two people who die are Dr. Grant in Mansfield Park and Mrs. Churchill in Emma.” John Mullan, “Who Dies in the Course of Her Novels?,” in What Matters in Jane Austen (Bloomsbury, 2012), 70 (excepting the Dashwood scenario that will be the focus of our fact pattern as a “little pre-history”). Professor Mullan adds that “[n]either is lamented; both deaths are indeed calculated to make us consider how we might fail to grieve at others’ mortality.” Ibid., 70.
18 A Lady (pseudonym for Jane Austen), Sense and Sensibility, Ch. 1 (1811).
19 Lynne Marie Kohm, Mark James, Amy Blevins Heidmann, and Jeffrey Oulette, Estate Planning Success Just for Women (Olympia Publishers, 2023), Ch. 3.
20 “freedom of disposition,” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed Aug. 5, 2025, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/freedom_of_disposition.“Freedom of disposition is the dominant principle of trusts and estates law, which advocates that the law should grant people freedom to dispose of their property in any way they want once they pass away.”
21 Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 117.
22 This is also based on the principle of “freedom of disposition.” “Freedom of disposition,” Legal Information Institute.
23 See, e.g., “elective share,” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed Aug. 5, 2025, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/elective_share. There was no elective share in Regency England; rather, there were “marriage portions” as contained in the marital settlement contract reached between the parties to the marriage and their agents. See Vic, “The Regency Estate: How it was Apportioned,” Jane Austen’s World, Jan. 14, 2009, https://janeaustensworld.com/2009/01/14/the-regency-estate-how-it-wa-apportioned/.
24 See Kohm, James, Heidmann, and Oulette, Estate Planning Success Just for Women, Ch. 3.
25 Ibid. See also “life estate,” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed Aug. 5, 2025, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/life_estate.
26 Kohm, James, Heidmann, and Oulette, Estate Planning Success Just for Women, Ch. 3.
27 “will,” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed Aug. 5, 2025, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/will.
28 See “Uniform Trust to Minors Act and Uniform Gifts to Minors Act,” Social Security Adm., June 3, 2024, https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0501120205.
29 “primogeniture,” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed Aug. 5, 2025, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/primogeniture.
And by the law at the time, the eldest son would inherit all the family property. If the eldest son was not available to inherit because he died before his father died, or was never born, as in the Bennet family in Pride and Prejudice, the estate would go to the first available male relative within a statutory consanguineous hierarchy, in that case, Mr. Collins. This often left women homeless, as it would have for the Bennet women. Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 24.
Furthermore, as one Oxford professor notes, “Where land was power and influence, only a fool would choose to squander that influence or see it pass into another family altogether.” Helena Kelly, Jane Austen, The Secret Radical, 78 (Icon Books, 2016). “Primogeniture amounted to almost a fetish […].” Ibid., 79.
30 Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 24. “The reason for this seemingly incongruous concept was that Britain wanted to preserve intact properties and prevent the nation’s wealth from becoming decentralized and divided.” Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 24. Primogeniture allows Austen to create female characters who set a marriage target on the elder son, from Lucy Steele in Sense and Sensibility to Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park, as just two examples. Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 26, and 25, respectively.
31 See, e.g., “elective share,” Legal Information Institute. Again, no elective share existed in Regency England; rather, there were “marriage portions” as contained in the marital settlement contract. See also Vic, “The Regency Estate: How it was Apportioned.”
32 A Lady, Pride and Prejudice, Ch. 1 (1813). Austen’s beloved opening line of the novel.
33 See generally Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, Chs. 3–6.
34 Lucy Worsley, Jane Austen at Home, 78 (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) (discussing the context surrounding the courtship of our professor’s sister in a chapter entitled “Cassandra’s romance”).
35 Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen, A Life (Knopf, 1997), 172.
36 Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 36:
Social laws of dating connections in Austen’s time, and to some extent now, obviously utilized various family and community informational avenues, but also had privacy protections built into the process as well. Waiting to enter the dating scene was never a young girl’s desire, as further evidenced by the fact that even the youngest Bennet sisters were in the market at just fifteen and sixteen (notably before the elder sisters were married). There were, however, dangers to such socializing, as the law would try to protect such young girls with statutory rape laws, privacy concepts, and various other child protections. For example, a girl younger than eighteen would be protected then and now, from consenting to sexual intercourse with an adult by criminal prosecution of that adult. This notion promotes the policing of young girls’ protection by the adult men around them. Family privacy was and still is a highly valued basic theme of family law. Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 36–37.
37 Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 93 (discussing marriage incentives).
38 A Lady, Pride and Prejudice, Ch. 46.
39 Ibid., Ch. 49.
40 Licensing serves the purpose of state registration, required then and now, tracking who is married to ensure the accuracy of the other substantive requirements of marriage (listed next) to protect vulnerable parties from marriage fraud. Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 70. For more on the English registry of marriage applications and licenses, the use of a special license, and how the civil authority worked in this regard, see Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 70.
41 While Professor Austen is not verbose on weddings themselves, she sometimes explains a wedding through a character.
The wedding was very much like other weddings, where the parties have no taste for finery or parade; and Mrs. Elton, from the particulars detained by her husband, thought it all extremely shabby, and very inferior to her own. […] But in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predications of the small band of trusted friends who witnessed the ceremony were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.” Jane Austen, Emma, Ch. 55 (1815).
42 See Mark S. Strasser, Lynne Marie Kohm, and Tanya Washington, Family Law from Multiple Perspectives, 3rd ed., Ch. 3 (West, 2024).
43 Ibid.
44 See 1 United States Code, sec. 7, Marriage (1996); also at the Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/1/7.
45 Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 71.
46 Strasser et al., Family Law from Multiple Perspectives, Ch. 3. Those states are Colorado: Section 14-2-109.5, Colorado Revised Statutes; District of Columbia: Hoage v. Murch Bros. Const. Co., 60 App.D.C. 218, 50 F.2d 983 (1931); Iowa: Iowa Code, sec. 425.17; Kansas: Kansas Statute 23-2502; Montana: 26-1-602(30) MCA; Oklahoma: Title 43 of the Oklahoma Statutes; Rhode Island: DeMelo v.Zompa, 844 A.2d 174, 177 (RI 2004); Texas: Texas Family Code, secs. 2.401–2.405.
47 Bryan A. Garner, A Handbook of Family Law Terms (West, 2001), 465.
48 Ibid.
49 The Statute of Frauds protects parties from oral or verbal agreements, requiring any contract regarding marriage to be in writing. Brian H. Bix, Family Law (West, 1999), 138, n.11. This contract can be made at any time before the marriage (prenuptial), or during the marriage (ante-nuptial), or after marital separation (post-nuptial, as in a separation agreement). Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 93. “In Jane’s time, financial incentives for marriage were secured legally with a written contract for an express agreement and bargained for exchange.” Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 93.
50 “The development of consent-based marriage in Western law can be at least somewhat attributed to the work of Jane Austen. Pushing the boundaries of love and money in a lifetime commitment, Jane illustrated examples of how each could go awry, and it seems she firmly held to holding out for a lifetime partner she could truly love and respect in that she refused to marry for money.” Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 74. In discussing arranged marriages, and marriage based on money or title, we spell out how the law of consent in marriage developed and evolved by statute and case law over time. See Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 75.
51 Ibid., 77. Fraud in the inducement occurs when the promises of one who never intends to complete his or her promise provokes the persuaded actions of the other. This is also called fraudulent inducement. Ibid.
52 A prime example of this is Maria Rushworth. Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 101. For an interesting discussion of Lady Susan’s spousal support scenario, see Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 96.
53 E.g., see Illinois’s statutory rape laws as defined under the Illinois Criminal Code of 2012, specifically in 720 ILCS 5/11-1.50.
54 Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 54. Discussing sexual decisions today, we note that while the laws throughout the United States have seen myriad changes from Regency times regarding sexual intimacy, the consequences to a family and to finances may have changed a bit as well. “Financial connections with sexual intimacy can seem less significant or important when the cost of sex is minimal, and the results can be thwarted or cheaply discarded.” Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 53 (adding that these changes have worked “not to close the divide between men and women in matters of sex and money, but to simply clarify it”). Furthermore, historians have noted that the fact pattern Professor Austen offers here would have been familiar to those who read her novels. “Her readers could recognize […] the allure of the camps and the dangerous charm of Wickham.” Jenny Uglow, In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 506.
55 Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 115–16.
56 Chwe, Michael Suk-Young, Austen, Jane, Game Theorist (Princeton University Press, 2013), 180.Google Scholar
57 Austen, Emma, Ch. 2.
58 See Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923) (holding unconstitutional a Nebraska law that prevented parents from allowing their children to learn German despite the state’s policy otherwise); Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925) (holding that parental choice of an appropriate education for their children is a constitutional right and liberty interest under the constitution); Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000) (holding that state law cannot grant visitation to any third party against a fit parent’s objection). While this case law reflects American legal rules, these were common law rules in Regency England. See generally, e.g., Ford W. Hall, “The Common Law: An Account of its Reception in the United States,” Vanderbilt Law Review 4 (1952): 791 (examining the similarities and differences). We also note the following: “This means that parents determine the standard of living for their children, make choices for their care and education, and establish their social status.” Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 116.
59 See Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745 (1982) (first setting out that standard).
60 See “Termination of Parental Rights,” Child Welfare Information Gateway (2016), https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/systemwide/courts/processes/legal-issues-in-adoption/termination/. Family reunification is the state’s persevering objective, and termination of parental rights is a remedy of last resort. Ibid.
61 Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57, 68 (2000).
62 “adoption,” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed Aug. 5, 2025, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/adoption.
63 For a thorough understanding of the principle, see generally Lynne Marie Kohm, “Can a dead hand from the grave protect the kids from darling daddy or Mommie Dearest?” Quinnipiac Probate Law Journal 31, no. 1 (2017) (considering the options that present themselves in the event of the death of a custodial parent).
64 See Strasser et al., Family Law from Multiple Perspectives, Ch. 8.
65 See “Open Adoption,” in Strasser et al., Family Law from Multiple Perspectives, 284–85.
66 Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 120.
67 Ibid., 125.
68 See, e.g., Lisa Fuller, “Intestate Succession Rights of Adopted Children: Should the Stepparent Exception be Extended?” Cornell Law Review 77 (1992): 1187–88.
69 Kohm and Akers, Law and Economics in Jane Austen, 15.
70 Ibid. Tracing the principles of law and economics in sex, marriage, and romance as set in Austen’s novels, this book unveils how those meticulous principles still control today’s modern romance, while unwittingly offering readers new insights into law and economics. Law and Economics in Jane Austen is most assuredly a book you need on your bookshelf for post-bar exam enjoyment.