‘Poetry, like the law, is a fiction’, wrote William Hazlitt in a critical essay of 1816. Hazlitt the critic took as his subject all aspects of his society's culture, including the connections between law, literature and power. He analysed the rhetoric of the lawyers and the legislative acts of politicians as products of a legal imagination comparable with the literary imagination of the poets. He examined the effects of those imaginings on the people, who were subjects of the law as well as readers of literary fictions. With characteristic forthrightness, he appended an aesthetic judgment to the comparison: ‘Poetry, like the law, is a fiction; only a more agreeable one.’

This book shares the conviction that law and literature have common properties of language and vision. In it I try to show how this connection matters, how it works to shape a culture's notions of justice and legal entitlement. The first three chapters explore the bases for linking law and literature; the next six present a historical account of shifts in their relationship in Anglophone culture from the Renaissance to the present.

In undertaking this study I have had the benefit of advice and support from many colleagues at the University of Western Australia. I would particularly like to thank Daniel Brown, Victoria Burrows, Tanya Dalziell, Gareth Griffiths, Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, Judith Johnston, Gail Jones, Andrew Lynch, Ian Saunders, Bob White and Chris Wortham. For administrative support I am grateful to Sue Lewis and Linda Cresswell.