The book traces the changing relation and intense debates between law and literature in U.S. American culture, using examples from the 18th to the 20th century (including novels by Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Harper Lee, and William Gaddis). Since the early American republic, the critical representation of legal matters in literary fictions and cultural narratives about the law served an important function for the cultural imagination and legitimation of law and justice in the United States. One of the most essential questions that literary representations of the law are...