Long before contemporary debates about artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus posed a question that law still struggles to answer: what does responsibility mean once human creation exceeds human control? The novel’s enduring relevance does not lie in its spectacle or horror, but in its quiet insistence that innovation, when severed from accountability, corrodes the moral foundations upon which law depends.
Shelley’s narrative is not an argument against knowledge or discovery. It is an indictment of abandonment. Victor Frankenstein’s true transgression is not the act of creation, but the refusal to remain answerable for what he has brought into the world. That withdrawal—more than the moment of invention itself—sets the chain of harm in motion.
Creation Without Stewardship
In legal cultures shaped by notions of duty, trust, and moral order, creation implies stewardship. Authority attracts responsibility; power demands restraint. Frankenstein dramatizes what happens when this ethic collapses. Victor’s flight from responsibility produces a vacuum in which harm multiplies without guidance, correction, or care.
This dynamic anticipates a central anxiety of modern law. As harm emerges from complex systems rather than discrete acts, responsibility becomes diffuse. Designers point to users, users to systems, and institutions to novelty. The law, trained to assign fault within familiar categories, arrives late—often after damage has already crystallised. Shelley’s insight is that the moral failure occurs earlier, at the moment responsibility is disowned.
Guilt, Punishment, and Moral Asymmetry
The novel’s moral universe is marked by imbalance. Innocents suffer consequences they did not cause, while the true author of harm evades proportionate accountability. Punishment becomes detached from culpability, revealing a system—formal or informal—that struggles to keep pace with new forms of agency.
This asymmetry mirrors a recurring temptation in legal reasoning: to punish outcomes rather than interrogate decisions, to assign liability after harm occurs rather than examine responsibility at the point of creation. Frankenstein suggests that when responsibility is deferred, justice becomes reactive, uneven, and morally unsatisfying.
Limits, Knowledge, and Moral Order
Shelley’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, is not ornamental. It situates the story within a moral tradition that recognises limits to human authority. Knowledge pursued without humility becomes dangerous not because it exists, but because it lacks ethical discipline. Power exercised without accountability erodes the very structures meant to contain it.
For legal cultures attentive to faith and moral order, this resonates deeply. Capability does not confer permission. Law, when severed from this principle, risks becoming a purely technical instrument—efficient in operation but hollow in justice.
Law as Culture, Before Law as Code
Frankenstein contains no statutes, no courts, and no judges. Yet it performs profoundly legal work. It asks questions that precede legislation: Who bears responsibility when harm is novel? How should blame be assigned when intention and outcome diverge? What obligations persist once creation escapes control?
By posing these questions outside doctrine, the novel trains the legal imagination before the law is written. In this sense, Frankenstein is not a warning about technology. It is a warning about ethical abdication—and about the limits of law when culture has already failed.
Reading as Professional Formation
Within an Edition concerned with law’s encounter with artificial intelligence, faith, and modernity, Frankenstein serves as a mirror rather than a manual. It reminds the legal profession that rules alone cannot compensate for responsibility denied at the outset.
To read Shelley today is to confront an unsettling possibility: that law struggles most not when harm is unprecedented, but when responsibility is refused before harm occurs. Culture must therefore do part of law’s work—shaping conscience, imagination, and restraint—long before doctrine is called upon to respond.
