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Introduction: Crime and Literature, Narrative and Doctrine
Simon Stern*
Criminal law has always had a central role in the field of law and literature. Crime, transgression, vengeance, guilt, and punishment are usually among the first topics that come to mind when people think about the law’s literary manifestations, along with the criminal trial as a paradigmatic legal form. In addition to crimes of violence such as murder, assault, and robbery, which have occupied the literary imagination since ancient times, word crimes like obscenity, blasphemy, sedition, and libel present unique features that fascinate legal and literary scholars alike. The rise of financial crime in the nineteenth century, including forgery, embezzlement, and fraud, has also attracted a considerable amount of scholarship that seeks to understand how writers of fiction grappled with new techniques for representing and abstracting assets, techniques that eerily resembled literary methods of representation.
Even before law and literature began to be regarded as a distinct area of research, a number of academic studies and anthologies explored these relations. Stories about crime dominated John Henry Wigmore’s “A List of Legal Novels” (1907), one of the first emanations from the legal academy to spotlight the place of law in literature, and often regarded as a significant precursor to the academic work that would begin to appear six or seven decades later.[1] The same was true for the mid-twentieth-century collections that shared Wigmore’s vision, such as Edmund Fuller’s Law in Action: An Anthology of the Law in Literature (1947), Albert Blaustein’s Fiction Goes to Court (1954), and Ephraim London’s The World of Law (1960). The following two decades saw the publication of several important studies, including Philip Collins’s Dickens and Crime (1962), Keith Hollingsworth’s The Newgate Novel (1963), Norman Berlin’s The Base String: The Underworld in Elizabethan Drama (1968), Jonathan Goodman’s Bloody Versicles: The Rhymes of Crime (1971), and Joseph Marshburn’s Blood and Knavery (1973)—not to mention many studies of detective fiction. By the 1980s, work in this vein was proliferating rapidly, and it has continued to take many different forms, including bibliographies, histories of crime in popular culture, and studies of particular writers and themes.[2]
More recent work has asked how literature can help us understand the epistemology and analysis of evidence, the structure of the trial, the development of doctrines and concepts such as attempt and mens rea, the changing treatment of crimes such as treason and conspiracy, and the representation of intention in forensic advocacy and judicial writing.[3] What these investigations share is a concern with literary form and modes of representation, on the one hand, and structures of legal analysis, on the other. That is to say that instead of asking how crime and criminals are portrayed in imaginative works, scholars have inquired into the conditions that make these portrayals possible. One strain of work, for instance, has asked how writers attempt to skirt criminal prohibitions on libel and obscenity, and how the law responds, in a series of dynamic interactions that affects the form and content of the prohibitions and of the writings they are designed to constrain.[4] Another strain has examined the epistemology of evidence law and the literary devices that enable, reflect, and challenge the law’s epistemological assumptions.[5] Others have investigated narrative forms that borrow from or respond to the trial form and its management of evidence.[6]
This issue builds on these recent developments, while also extending them along several dimensions. Some recent work has begun to expand the geographical range of work on criminal literature,[7] and the essays in this issue take us from medieval England, to nineteenth-century America and Russia, to mid-twentieth-century India, and to contemporary Germany. Just as the essays range historically and geographically, they also exhibit a wide methodological range, exploring poetry and treatises, contrasting depositions and novels, drawing on Telegram posts and bureaucratic archives, and creatively melding theatre and law in the tradition of playwrights like Joanna Baillie, poets like Charles Reznikoff, and novelists like William Gaddis.[8] If links between literature and criminal law once seemed intriguing because of the dramas of revenge and guilt that literature offers to legal scholars, this set of essays showcases a much wider set of sources, opportunities, and connections.
Elise Wang’s article, “Felon and Villain: The Literary Life of Felony,” explores felony’s thirteenth-century origins, showing that it began as a literary concept and category before being taken up as an essential term in criminal law. The word appeared first in Norman French as a way of designating a certain kind of actor—a traitorous, cruel, faithless betrayer who abuses a position of trust. In Handlyng Synne (1303), for instance, the term is applied to Judas. Britton (c. 1291-92) defines felony as a harmful act that someone does “to one to whom he pretends to be a friend.” However, as Wang notes, not just any harm would do: even at that time, “there was already a fairly stable list: murder, rape, arson, robbery, and treason.”[9] The importance of betrayal has profound implications for literary narratives about felony, bringing out a contrast between pretense and reality, highlighting the temporal disjunct between the past when the felon was trusted and the present knowledge of their villainy, inviting access to the perpetrator’s knowledge and intentions (which may be invisible to the other characters), and eliciting a sense of justice as to the appropriate punishment at the tale’s end. Imaginative writers could use all the devices at their disposal to explore these features, and yet, as Wang shows, they are not limited to chronicles and poems but also find expression in treatises and case reports. For instance, in a case from 1353 concerning the attempted theft of linen from an inn, Chief Justice William Shareshull denounced the act in terms that go beyond the law’s conception of felony, saying that the defendant should have been convicted “even if he did not intend force, hurt no one, and took nothing at all”[10]—an outburst that hinges on a counterfactual story and that encapsulates, in its outrage, many of the narrative and affective features Wang identifies.
Chaucer’s hazy and shadowy vision in The Knight’s Tale offers another means of perceiving the commonalities in literary and legal treatments of felony. As Wang emphasizes throughout, one of the term’s most distinctive aspects is that, instead of being defined by reference to certain elements that explain why a particular set of offenses belong in this category, felony is defined according to its effects: crimes are classified as felonies because they result in a prison sentence of a certain length (and may be further divided into classes according to whether the term is at least ten years, at least twenty-five years, etc.). Chaucer’s imagery similarly conjures up a series of implied malefactors, known according to the result of their actions: “The sheepbarn burning with the black smoke; / The treason of the murdering in the bed.”[11] The reader is invited to supply a whole range of details to complete the picture, potentially including the trial and sentence that should follow. A further result is that, because of our moral certainty about the harm that the crime inflicts, and the punishment it merits, we demand of the law a kind of certainty, in the form of proof, that the law cannot furnish. Starting from felony’s poetic origins, Wang unfolds a whole series of literary-legal, imaginative-doctrinal connections that pervade the concept up to the present day.
Hannah Walser’s essay, “Free Indirect Hearsay: Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal of the 1741 New York Conspiracy,” links the history of criminal conspiracy with questions of intention and the representation of thought and belief. Despite the centrality of intention in the analysis of criminal liability, research on the conceptual and technical means of representing intention, and making it manifest to others (judges, jurors, readers) is only in its infancy. Walser models an approach that could help to foster further work in this area. Since the late 1970s, there has been a stream of narratological research on free indirect discourse—the device by which fictional works purport to provide direct access to a character’s thoughts.[12] Over the last twenty years, a few scholars have recognized its importance for understanding how lawyers and jurists attempt to portray mental states in their advocacy and writing.[13] The law of conspiracy, as Walser shows, provides a vital context for exploring these questions. Some historians have contended that the late eighteenth century marks a point at which common lawyers increasingly focused their attention on crimes in which the malicious intent was not immediately legible from the act itself; however, criminal conspiracy had always posed this problem, because conspiracy is inherently secret and furtive, and is usually detected by inference rather than direct access.
Walser examines the Journal kept by Daniel Horsmanden, one of the justices who presided over the grand jury investigations and trials of hundreds of enslaved Black men charged with conspiring to burn down the city of New York in 1741. The Journal includes the depositions of Arthur Price, a white servant who had been jailed on unrelated charges and offered to report on the conversations he overheard and participated in. The tone and syntax of Price’s statements, as recorded by Horsmanden, closely resemble the style associated with free indirect discourse. For instance, Price reports a conversation with Peggy Kerry, an alleged conspirator, in which he asked whether she had been afraid that others might turn her in: “[S]he said no; for [her co-conspirators] were all true-hearted fellows.”[14] The subtle shift in verb tense, from the expected “are” to “were” in this phrase, is a hallmark of the free indirect style that would become increasingly familiar in nineteenth-century fiction. Walser includes many more examples, which are difficult to capture in brief excerpts because they unfold over several sentences. This way of representing speech gives the impression of an inadvertent revelation, particularly significant in the context of conspiracy, because direct evidence and acknowledgment would be so hard to obtain. This is also one of the style’s essential functions in fiction, where it often serves to reveal something unfavorable about the character whose thoughts are captured in this way. In presenting their words in this fashion, Horsmanden conveys the sense that he is directly and accurately recording the speakers’ words without opining or editorializing. The style allows him to maintain his distance from the speakers, just as novelistic free indirect discourse is known for distancing the narrator from the character whose perceptions are being noted. Here, as Walser shows, the effect is to “quarantine conspiratorial speech,”[15] facilitating its use as evidence and anticipating the hearsay distinction between the content of the speech (“the matter asserted”) and its style. When introduced to reveal something about the speaker’s manner of speaking, such a statement would be admissible as non-hearsay: it is not being used to establish that these words are true, but that they were uttered. In ranging across literary and legal devices and doctrines, Walser offers a pre-history of a form of novelistic discourse and of some basic problems and distinctions in criminal law and evidence.
Anna Schur’s essay, “Law, Conscience, and Russian National Identity: ‘Higher Justice’ in the Shadow of the War,” moves to a different era and national context, focusing on attitudes towards lawyers and the legal order in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Russian literature, despite its rich offerings, has so far received limited attention from scholars in this field, and Schur’s essay demonstrates its potential.[16] She studies a trope that cast law as cold, formal, heartless, mechanical, instrumental, and exclusivist, in contrast to an organic sense of “higher justice” that was not guided by rules and codes, but instead expressed the spiritual freedom of the Russian people. In this way, Schur’s work extends a line of historical research on attitudes about the law in both popular and elite media, asking how these attitudes may have tangible effects, particularly in prominent trials.[17] Schur traces this trope back to the eleventh century but focuses on its invocation by essayists, propagandists, poets, and novelists from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. She finds it expressed variously in the works of writers like Leo Tolstoy, Feodor Dostoevsky, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as well as jurists like Boris Chicherin and Bogdan Kistiakovsky. Schur also touches on a series of important criminal trials in which the trope helped to secure an acquittal or conviction. For instance, when Vera Zasulich was tried in 1878 for shooting and wounding a governor of St. Petersburg, because he had ordered the flogging of a political prisoner, her lawyer persuaded the jurors to focus on her motives, and successfully appealed to them as exponents of the country’s “social conscience.”[18] In a 1923 trial of Catholic clergy, the state prosecutor argued that “the exact wording of law articles” should not stand in the way of the jurors’ “revolutionary conscience.”[19] The contrast motivated by this recurrent trope, Schur demonstrates, “is overpowering in its monotony, intensity, and sheer volume.”[20] Together, these examples show how literature can inform and energize popular sentiment in a way that can have very tangible legal consequences.
In “The ‘Lady’ Again: The Persecution, and Prosecution, of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in India,” Abhinav Sekhri shifts the focus to the post-World War II era, examining the trials and tribulations of D. H. Lawrence’s novel in India, some twenty years after the adoption of a constitution that included protections for speech and expression, and shortly after a federal court in the United States had held that the book was not obscene. Scholarship on the history of obscenity law has been particularly concerned with its efforts to regulate licit and illicit sexuality;[21] Sekhri extends this line of work by uncovering a set of bureaucratic memos debating the effects of literature on sexual behavior, hovering in the background of the legal decisions that would ultimately uphold a ban on Lawrence’s novel. In tracing the novel’s fortunes through the courts, and through a series of reversals that ended in a finding of obscenity, Sekhri’s archival research shows how the legal authorities drew on different arguments and theories at each stage of the litigation. Imported from the U.S. into India in 1959, the novel was sold in unexpurgated form at Ranjit Udeshi’s Happy Book Stall in Bombay (among other places). Courts, lawyers, and bureaucrats would offer conflicting views over the next few years. One line of discussion began in the Ministry of Home Affairs and ended with a short note from the Prime Minister, stating that the novel should be banned. Another line proceeded from litigation that began when the police raided several bookstalls, including Udeshi’s, charging the owners with possessing and selling obscene works. Among the views that emerged were
- that the novel was obscene because it was unduly prurient, going into graphic sexual detail that was “not needed or appropriate to enable the members of society to cope with the exigency of their period”;[22]
- that the novel undermined the institution of marriage and the womanly ideals of “devotion, love, and sacrifice”;[23]
- that the book was obscene under the Hicklin standard, which asked if the work had a “tendency” to “deprave and corrupt” those whose minds were susceptible to its harmful influence;
- that the Hicklin standard failed to take account of different audiences and social contexts;
- that the author’s intentions (discernible from his letters) could establish the book’s literary merits;
- that the police should not be charged with enforcing any ban, because they lacked the training to make a proper legal determination; and
- that the entire community should not be deprived of access to a particular work only because “a certain minority of persons” would find it depraved.
Ultimately the Supreme Court would hold that the novel was obscene, relying in no small part (despite this range of arguments) on the Hicklin standard.[24] On the one hand, that result is significant because it shows what little effect this wide-ranging debate would have. On the other hand, as Sekhri’s careful excavation of the archives demonstrates, by reference to a wide array of legal decisions, memos, letters, and newspaper articles, the result was by no means a foregone conclusion and the debate itself attests to the difficulties of a modernizing constitutional order as it confronted a notorious problem in criminal law.
Daria Bayer’s contribution, “Truth, Trial, Tragedy: The Cultural Frame of Criminal Law,” completes this issue by blending literature and criminal law, political theatre and the trial process. Translating excerpts from her play Tragödie des Rechts (2021), she presents a series of questions, montages, scenarios, observations, and criticisms to inquire into the similarities and differences between criminal proceedings and political theatre. In the process, she builds on Greta Olson’s recent work on how Rechtsgefühle (feelings about law and justice) influence legal processes.[25] That Bayer offers an academic exploration of these issues through the medium of theatre is especially significant given that the field of law and literature has only recently been taken up by scholars in Germany, where a traditional focus on doctrine still accounts for most legal scholarship.[26] Theatre invites open-ended interpretation and speculation whereas trials seek to produce definite answers. A decision sets out an officially binding narrative whereas a play invites the audience to contribute to its meaning. At the same time, both judges and playwrights take on responsibilities towards their audiences. Plays and trials may even have similar structures. Using three examples, from an imagined trial of Yevgeny Pashukanis, a playhouse in which the audience members become subject to a kind of Cum Ex tax scam-cum-nightmare,[27] and a play centering on the rape of an aspiring barrister, Bayer shows how stagecraft can be used to provoke reflections and reactions that legal writing may seek to evade. One reason why political theatre has such great potential, she observes, is that it enlists numerous kinds of participants whose specialties do not find ready analogues in the legal context—“director, actors, writers, technicians, costume makers, stage builders, video artists, [and] researchers.”[28] Accordingly, plays can engage the audience by using any number of tools and artifices that are unavailable to jurists. Together, these essays trace out and experiment with a wide array of connections that link the theory, history, and practice of criminal law to its literary counterparts, complements, and alternatives, looking to poetry, drama, fiction, and historical narrative along the way. The essays in this issue expand the historical and geographical range of the field, suggesting new opportunities for comparative research, including work that pursues comparative law in the same vein as comparative literature, and that looks at the fortunes of doctrinal concepts across time and jurisdictions. The result is a series of reflections and provocations that suggest vast new vistas for the study of crime, punishment, legal doctrine, literature, and narrative technique.
* Faculty of Law and Department of English, University of Toronto.
[1] John H. Wigmore, A List of Legal Novels, 2 Ill. L. Rev. 574 (1907).
[2] For a fuller discussion of the research in this area and its historical development, see Simon Stern, Law and Literature, in The Oxford Handbook of Criminal Law 111 (Markus D. Dubber & Tatjana Hörnle eds., 2014).
[3] See, e.g., John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793-1796 (2000); Jan-Melissa Schramm, Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology (2000);Jonathan H. Grossman, The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel (2003); Lisa Rodensky, The Crime in Mind: Criminal Responsibility and the Victorian Novel (2003); Lindsay Farmer, Criminal Responsibility and the Proof of Guilt, UC Berkeley JSP Working Papers (2005) (https://perma.cc/29BS-GMYP); Jeannine Marie DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity (2012); Derek Dunne, Re‐assessing Trial by Jury in Early Modern Law and Literature, 12 Lit. Compass 517 (2015); Geoffrey A. Baker, “I Know the Man”: Evidence, Belief, and Character in Victorian Fiction, 50 Genre 39 (2017); Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England (2019); Matthew Levay, Violent Minds: Modernism and the Criminal (2019); Adam Kozaczka, Character Evidence, Mediocrity, and Walter Scott’s Advocate-Narrator, 31 Eur. Romantic Rev. 351 (2020); Narratives in the Criminal Process (Frode Helmich Pedersen et al. eds., 2021); Matthew Ritger, Milton and the Literary Workhouse, 63 Milton Stud. 294 (2021); Ralph Grunewald, Narratives of Guilt and Innocence: The Power of Storytelling in Wrongful Conviction Cases (2023); Grace Delmolino, Fraudulent Counsel: Legal Temporality and the Poetics of Liability in Dante’s Inferno, Boniface VIII’s Liber Sextus, and Gratian’s De penitentia, 98 Speculum 727 (2023); Lisa Haber-Thomson, The Territory of John Howard’s Measured Buildings: From Local Jail to National Project, 28 J. Architecture 1109 (2023); Erin Forbes, Criminal Genius in African American and US Literature, 1793-1845 (2024); Faith Barter, Black Pro Se : Authorship and the Limits of Law in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (2025); Geoffrey A. Baker, Belief in Evidence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (forthcoming); Claire Wrobel, Panoptic Fiction Since 1984: Theory, Surveillance and the Anglo-American Novel (forthcoming).
[4] See, e.g., Gary R. Dyer, Reading as a Criminal in Early Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35 Wordsworth Circle 141 (2004); Gary Dyer, Publishers and Lawyers, 44 Wordsworth Circle 121 (2013); Gary Dyer, Lord Byron’s Trademark, 87 ELH: English Lit. Hist. 679 (2020); Katherine Mullin, Unmasking The Confessional Unmasked: The 1868 Hicklin Test and the Toleration of Obscenity, 85 ELH: English Lit. Hist. 471 (2018); Simon Stern, Fanny Hill and the “Laws of Decency”: Investigating Obscenity in the Mid-Eighteenth Century, 43 Eighteenth-Century Life 162 (2019); Zachary Samalin, The Masses Are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust 213-40 (2021); Andrew Benjamin Bricker, Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670-1792 (2022); Arnav Bhattacharya, “Literature of the Muck-Heap” versus Scientia Sexualis: Sexology, Obscenity, and Censorship in Early to Mid-Twentieth-Century India, J. Hist. Sexuality 56 (2024).
[5] In addition to the work by Schramm, Rodensky, and Baker cited in note 3, see, e.g., Ian A. Burney, Poison, Detection, and the Victorian Imagination (2006); Melissa M. Littlefield, The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction (2011); Anat Rosenberg, The History of Genres: Reaching for Reality in Law and Literature, 39 Law & Soc. Inquiry 1057 (2014); Carrie Hyde, Novelistic Evidence: The Denmark Vesey Conspiracy and Possibilistic History, 27 Am. Lit. Hist. 26 (2014); Andrew Mangham, Dickens’s Forensic Realism: Truth, Bodies, Evidence (2016); Julia Simon-Kerr, Uncovering Credibility, in The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities 583 (Simon Stern et al. eds., 2020); Daniel Williams, The Art of Uncertainty: Probable Realism and the Victorian Novel (2024); Virtuelle Investigationen: Revisionen des Indizienparadigmas in Literatur und Kunst (Nursan Celik & Rahel Jendges eds., 2024).
[6] See, e.g., Hilary M. Schor, Show-Trials: Character, Conviction and the Law in Victorian Fiction, 11 Law & Lit. 179 (1999); Michael Scrivener, Trials in Romantic-Era Writing: Modernity, Guilt, and the Scene of Justice, 35 Wordsworth Circle 128 (2004); Lisa Kern Griffin, Narrative, Truth, and Trial, 101 Geo. L.J. 281 (2012); Jan-Melissa Schramm, Towards a Poetics of (Wrongful) Accusation: Innocence and Working-Class Voice in Mid-Victorian Fiction, in Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt 193 (Yota Batsaki et al. eds., 2012); Anne E. Ralph, Narrative-Erasing Procedure, 18 Nev. L.J. 573 (2017); Victoria Myers, Trial Literature, in The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism 294 (David Duff ed., 2018).
[7] See, e.g., Mengdie Zhao, “Killing the Adulterer”: Masculine Revenge Fantasies in Seventeenth-Century China, 43 Late Imperial China 1 (2022); Haiyan Lee, A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination (2023); Tony D. Qian, Qualities of Mercy: Capital Punishment and the Royal Prerogative in Familial Cases in the Chosŏn Records of Adjudications (Simnirok), Law & Literature (2024) (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1535685X.2024.2367884); Grace Delmolino, Fraudulent Counsel: Legal Temporality and the Poetics of Liability in Dante’s Inferno, Boniface VIII’s Liber Sextus, and Gratian’s De penitentia, 98 Speculum 727 (2023).
[8] Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions (1798) use the trial form to explore hate and revenge. Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony (1934, 1978) draws on case reports to form poems that explore domestic violence and hate crimes, among other topics. William Gaddis offers up a number of judicial opinions as part of the text of his novel A Frolic of His Own (1994).
[9] Elise Wang, Felon and Villain: The Literary Life of Felony, 1 Mod. Crim. L. Rev. 169, 172 (2025).
[10] Id. at 175.
[11] Id. at 177.
[12] Some of the most significant contributions include Roy Pascal, The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Functioning in the Nineteenth-Century European Novel (1977); Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (1978); Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narrative and the Representation of Language in Fiction (1982); Monika Fludernik, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction (1993); D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (2003); Arden Hegele, Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading (2022); and Timothy Bewes, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (2022).
[13] In addition to the work by Grossman and Rodensky cited in note 3, see, e.g., Lisa Siraganian, Theorizing Corporate Intentionality in Contemporary American Fiction, 27 Law & Literature 99 (2015); Sara Murphy, Inadmissible Evidence: The Trial of Madeleine Smith and Collins’s The Law and the Lady, 44 Victorian Lit. & Culture (2016); Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Free Indirect Discourse, 46 Victorian Lit. & Culture 706 (2018); Simon Stern, Omniscient Narrative Modes in Law: From Trial Strategy to the Fellow-Servant Rule, 20 Law Culture & Human. 291 (2024); Eve Houghton, He Said/She Said: Free Indirect Style Before the Novel, 51 Critical Inquiry 247 (2025).
[14] Hannah Walser, Free Indirect Hearsay: Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal of the 1741 New York Conspiracy, 1 Mod. Crim. L. Rev. 179, 186 (2025).
[15] Id. at 187.
[16] The leading work in this area includes Harriet Murav, Russia’s Legal Fictions (1992); Gary Rosenshield, Western Law, Russian Justice: Dostoevsky, the Jury Trial, and the Law (2005); and Anna Schur, The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia (2022). For some important recent work, see Erica Drennan, Reading and Judging: Russian Literature on Trial (Ph.D. Thesis, Columbia University, 2021); Erica Drennan, The Other Trial in The Brothers Karamazov, 27 Dostoevsky Stud. 41 (2024); and Desislava Naydenova, Storytelling as Law: Balkan Legal Culture in the 14th to 18th Centuries, 24 Slavia Meridionalis article 3330 (2024) (https://perma.cc/U92V-ZP5R).
[17] See, e.g., Richard K. Sherwin, When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line Between Law and Popular Culture (2000); Julie Stone Peters, Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe (2022).
[18] Anna Schur, Law, Conscience, and Russian National Identity: “Higher Justice” in the Shadow of the War, 1 Mod. Crim. L. Rev. 196, 205 (2025).
[19] Id. at 207.
[20] Id. at 211.
[21] See, e.g., Bhattacharya, supra note 4.
[22] Abhinav Sekhri, The “Lady” Again: The Persecution, and Prosecution, of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in India, 1 Mod. Crim. L. Rev. 215, 222 (2025).
[23] Id. at 229.
[24] In R. v. Hicklin, (1868) L.R. 3 Q.B. 360, 368, the court explained that a work is obscene if “the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” Many scholars have mistakenly concluded that the court was announcing, for the first time, a standard that was indifferent to authorial intent; in fact intent had always been irrelevant to the evaluation of obscenity. For discussion of the case see Mullin, supra note 4; Bhattacharya, supra note 4. On the role of intent, see also Simon Stern, Wilde’s Obscenity Effect: Influence and Immorality in The Picture of Dorian Gray, 68 Rev. English Stud. 756 (2017).
[25] Greta Olson, From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect (2022).
[26] In addition to Olson’s work, id., there are now several important research centers, including one supervised by Klaus Stierstorfer at the University of Münster, in Collaborative Research Centre 1385 “Law and Literature” (see, e.g., Law and Literature in Europe and Beyond (Klaus Stierstorfer ed., 2025)), and one supervised by Peter Schneck at the University of Osnabrück, which sponsors a Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law (https://perma.cc/4D6H-C8L3).
[27] See Correctiv, CUMEX FIILES, Oct. 21, 2021 (https://perma.cc/QQP3-TQRP); Lucia Sommerer, Criminology of Crime Avoidance. Creative Compliance Delinquency in the Borderlands of Legality, 8 Compliance Elliance J. 30 (2022).
[28] Daria Bayer, Truth, Trial, Tragedy: The Cultural Frame of Criminal Law, 1 Mod. Crim. L. Rev. 237, 247 (2025).
Suggested Citation: Simon Stern, Introduction: Crime and Literature, Narrative and Doctrine, 1 Mod. Crim. L. Rev. 160 (2025).