Focusing on Justine Moritz’s trial and its political and legal contexts, this essay explores Mary Shelley’s uses of Geneva as a response to the British government’s arbitrary, repressive measures in 1817. Considering events involved in the creation of Geneva’s criminal or civil code, I show how Shelley draws on both Old Regime and Revolutionary representations of the city‐republic in her narrative of Moritz’s and other trials to dramatize the resemblances between Revolutionary violence and arbitrary law. By historicizing the theme of justice in Frankenstein and replacing it in its original context, I argue that Shelley’s novel endorses neither a patriarchal form of government nor radical politics but makes a powerful case for a legitimate rule of law that strictly upholds rational, codified principles.
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