SOURCE: Posner, Richard A. “The Reflection of Law in Literature.” In Law and Literature, revised and enlarged edition, pp. 11-48. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Posner argues, citing numerous examples of fiction that encompass legal issues, that the law figures in literary works as a metaphor rather than as the center of thematic interest.

Law is so common a subject of literature that one is tempted to infer a deep affinity between the two fields, giving the lawyer privileged access if not to the whole body of literature then at least to those works that are explicitly about law. But I shall argue that the frequency of legal subjects in literature is partly a statistical artifact and that law figures in literature more often as metaphor than as an object of interest in itself, even when the author is a lawyer (like Kafka) or a...