SOURCE: "The Reflection of Law in Literature: 'Legal' Novels by Cozzens, Twain, and Camus," in Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation, Harvard University Press, 1988, pp. 79-88.

Posner is a lawyer and author of several books, including The Economics of Justice (1981) and The Problems of Jurisprudence (1990). In the following excerpt, he contends that The Just and the Unjust is not about the law, rather it is a story about the rite-of-passage of a young man.

… I begin in low key with a work that after more than forty years seems on its way to being recognized as a minor classic—James Gould Cozzens's novel The Just and the Unjust, a work so pervasively and accurately "about" law that one might think the author an experienced lawyer (he had no legal training). Yet this is an illusion; the book is not about law in any interesting sense.

The setting is...