Law Lit: From Atticus Finch to The Practice: A Collection of Great Writing About the Law

The fiction and poetry that every literate lawyer will want to know and every armchair attorney will devour.

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."—William Shakespeare

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ayn Rand, Martin Luther King Jr., and Johnny Cash have all written it. Joseph K., Hurricane Carter, Portia, and Bigger Thomas have starred in the most timeless examples of the genre. And now, law school professor and noted novelist Thane Rosenbaum has collected the crusaders and casualties of the law, both real and imagined, in one handsome volume of "law lit."

Some of the finest writers in the world have been tantalized by the law and the nature of judgment, justice, and revenge. With dozens of selections, including prose, poetry, essays, and even TV and film scripts, Law Lit is a dazzling collection that transcends place and time, from ancient Greece to foggy London to the narrow streets of Prague and the spectacle of an Alabama courthouse, offering an enlightening look at the legal system and its practitioners and at how lives can be laid bare before the bench.

Thane Rosenbaum is an essayist, law professor, and award-winning novelist. His writing appears frequently in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Sun. He is the former literary editor of Tikkun, as well as author of The Myth of Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What's Right, which was selected by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the Best Books of 2004. The John Whelan Distinguished Lecturer in Law at Fordham Law School, Rosenbaum lives in New York City.