This superb study builds on what might be called “the Friedman Frame” for analyzing relationships among American society, the legal system, and U.S. history. To begin, it is society that moves, molds, and alters the legal system, which operates as “the dependent variable” and exerts a rather “modest impact on society” (5). A history of law highlights “past legal culture”—“the ideas, attitudes and values” that people held “with regard to the legal system” (5). A historical account also explores the system's functional and instrumental role since “laws are responses to some sort of demand or request” (35). In addition, the legal system stages “a kind of didactic theater” from which people can learn what “acts are worse than others and why and by how much” (12). Finally, a central task of legal history involves suggesting the purposes that might have been served by the gaps—or the “leeways”—between formal legal rules and the living law.

Unfolding within this framework, Guarding Law's Dark Secrets offers a multilayered, broadly imagined overview of changing legal and social controls over reputation, propriety, and privacy. The work of a grand master of legal history—and a masterful storyteller—the book punctuates its always suggestive analysis with pitch-perfect tales about the rules and roles of law.

This study begins with the complicated network of nineteenth-century social practices and legal doctrines that Lawrence Friedman calls “the Victorian compromise.” Strictures against defamation, blackmail, invasion of privacy, prostitution, obscenity, and other worrisome activities expressed the desire, implied rather than openly stated, to shield shadowed secrets, especially ones about society's most prominent people (213). This approach, by assuming that the discrediting of the best people could cause “severe structural damage” to the larger society, offered “a rather subtle theory of social control” (12–13, 67). Laws against blackmail, for example, would, it was hoped, help to keep parts of the past “safely buried” (98). Defamation doctrines supposedly guarded reputation. A new law of privacy proposed erecting an even higher “wall of protection around the lives and reputations of respectable people” (220).

If the formal law announced a strict code of morality, the legal system selectively enforced its strictures. The Victorian compromise thus allowed “a certain amount of slack or leeway” and left “the door open for a certain amount of discreet deviation,” especially for the “pillars of the community” (99). As long as the purveyors of prostitution and pornography operated discretely, for instance, those charged with enforcing the law invariably looked the other way, especially when customers otherwise seemed, at least on the surface, respectable gentleman. Similarly, the living law engaged in a kind of “genteel cover-up” when faced with instances of domestic violence.

Two powerful legal-social-cultural movements doomed this Victorian compromise. First, moral crusaders demanded “zero tolerance” for sin and sinners. Tolerating brothels and pornographers—and protecting the secrets of those who patronized them—should give way to stamping out red-light districts and shuttering businesses that trafficked in sexualized imagery. This approach attracted Victorians such as Anthony Comstock and, later, Progressives such as James Robert Mann (a key supporter of both the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the White Slave Act of 1910). Antivice crusades generally faltered, especially when free expression claims gained ground, but they helped undermine the old legal and social arrangements.

Secondly, what Friedman calls the “expressive” or “permissive” society (one “supremely conscious of individual rights and wants and needs”) eventually overturned the Victorian compromise (256). By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the legal system allowed “ordinary people much more leeway, much more freedom” in their lifestyle choices. A “Peeping Tom society” and a “cultural classlessness” left the better sorts without “the freedom they once had to violate decency rules … under the sheltering wing of the Victorian Compromise” (4–5, 232). Ritualistic concern for reputation, propriety, and privacy seldom helped the “elite—celebrities in any event …” —whose reputations and secrets were “at the mercy of journalists, paparazzi, and almost everybody else” (241).

Guarding Life's Dark Secrets nicely combines a broad and invariably generous reading of the secondary literature with striking examples of its general themes. The chapter on “the anatomy of blackmail,” for instance, offers a powerful analysis that also reads as well as the popular novel whose title it invokes. Similarly, “Sticks and Stones” aptly names its chapter on defamation. A discussion of the computer age provides a suggestive prologue to ongoing debates over the social and legal impact of social networking sites such as Facebook. And its larger idea of the Victorian compromise fits well with subsequent studies, such as Donna Dennis's Licentious Gotham (2009). This valuable book, in short, constantly shines its own bright light into how a “world of closed doors and drawn blinds” became one of “the one-way mirror” and “the all-seeing eye” (272).