The law and literature movement is now nearly a quarter of a century old. One of its hallmarks has always been a deep interdisciplinarity: the movement is peopled by literary scholars who write knowledgeably of legal history, and legal scholars with impressive literary critical facility. However, some disciplinary distinctions remain. The former group focuses primarily on instances of law in literature, exploring representations of legal themes, tropes, and issues, while the latter attends chiefly to law as literature, mounting arguments about the instability of law's textuality and the hermeneutic problems surrounding a supposedly stable and authoritative form of speech. The central achievement of Kieran Dolin's A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature is the fact that it unites these two disciplinary camps in a single book. Informed by the law and literature movement but not precisely of it, Dolin offers “a historical overview of relations between law and literature” from the Renaissance through the present (182). His context is mostly Anglo-American (although the book does include a chapter on law and literature in postcolonial Nigeria), and Dolin manages this sweeping scope deftly, making the book a valuable resource for students and other newcomers to some of the central issues surrounding law and literature.

Reflecting the disciplinary split within the law and literature movement, Dolin divides the book into two parts. Part I, “The Text of the Law and the Law of the Text,” deals with what Dolin calls “the two fundamental relations between the fields” of law and literature, literature's insistence that law is inescapably a matter of language and law's assumption of its right to regulate literature” (15). Dolin writes for novices rather than experts. His explicative aim is clear from the very first chapter, in which the stated goal is to “describe some of the more important approaches to the language of the law” (21). To accomplish this descriptive task, Dolin surveys the role of rhetorical and literary devices in legal discourse, noting that although “tropes such as metaphor and personification … may seem decorative, [but] encode implicit values and habitual ways of thinking” (24); he highlights the influence of linguistics in legal semiotics; and he explores both the theory and the practice of narrative jurisprudence by summarizing some of its foundational texts and examining two cases notable for their use of this mode. Dolin follows chapter 1's study of the literary elements of legal discourse with a chapter that provides “a critical history of some of the more significant ways in which the production and distribution of literature has been regulated by law” (70). Focusing on blasphemy, obscenity, and sedition, Dolin surveys a number of transitional historical moments in Anglo-American legal history from the Renaissance to the present day in order to illustrate how authors and their literary texts have been engines of change and evolution for legal standards of decency and freedom of expression.

In Part II, Dolin shifts from a thematic to a chronological focus. Focusing chiefly on English law, Dolin identifies key moments within the history of the law-literature relationship and categorizes each literary-historical period in terms of a single legal development and a single defining author. Dolin begins his account in sixteenth-century England and asserts that Renaissance law and literature are linked chiefly through the increased importance of contract in the period. He surveys some of the era's key contract-based cases and examines the so-called Slade's Case at some length because, in his view, it “authorized the central element in Anglo-American contract law, that ‘consideration’ in the form of a quid pro quo, an exchange of something tangible, is a necessary part in a legally enforceable contract” (87). Dolin turns to Shakespeare to support his claims for the contract's centrality to Renaissance law and literature, paying particular attention to The Merchant of Venice, which he calls “a profound exploration of the new market culture” (91). Moving next to the eighteenth century, Dolin points to issues of crime and punishment as the central legal concerns of the age and identifies novelist and political pamphleteer Henry Fielding as the signal author for exploring law-literature relations in the period. Dolin argues for the spirit of reform, particularly reforms in “the legal position of women,” as the defining legal development of the Victorian era, and positions Charles Dickens as the author through which to illustrate his case (121). In the chapter on the modern era, Kafka and Freud stand in as the literary figures who highlight what Dolin calls an unprecedented tension between law and literature, brought about because “the common law … was a major bulwark of the system of inherited custom,” while the literature period brought “ceaseless changes” and “`the repeated shocks’ of the new” (144). To this survey of 400 years of British legal history, Dolin appends two chapters: one that explores the aftereffects of British law in postcolonial Nigeria through selected legal cases and the work of Wole Soyinka, and one that identifies a “commitment to equal justice in American society” as one of the guiding aims (and particular accomplishments) of the law and literature movement (182).

As the previous paragraph suggests, Dolin paints the general contours of Anglo-American legal and literary history with broad brushstrokes. While this is necessarily the case in a book of such scope, the breadth of focus does lead to a few anachronisms (as when Dolin calls Percy Shelley's Defence of Poetry—a quintessentially Romantic document written in 1819—a manifesto that sets the agenda for law-literature relations in the eighteenth century) and overgeneralizations (as when the complex history of copyright law in eighteenth-century Britain is discussed and dismissed in a few paragraphs). These quibbles should not deter readers looking for a solid, well-researched introduction to the historical interrelations of law and literature, because Dolin's book is logically organized, well written, and insightful. Furthermore, its extensive bibliography makes the book a valuable reference for both novices and more advanced students of the field.