Making the case that legal issues are central to James Joyce’s life and work, international experts in law and literature offer new insights into Joyce’s most important texts. They analyze Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Giacomo Joyce, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake in light of the legal contexts of Joyce’s day. Topics include marriage laws, the Aliens Act of 1905, laws governing display and use of language, minority rights debates, municipal self-government, rentier culture, and regulations on alcohol consumption and licensing. This volume also highlights Joyce’s own fascination with law and legal inquiry and explores how, by adopting a unique visual and linguistic style, Joyce constructed an authorial identity that mirrored the process of trademark. It also offers a deeper understanding of Judge John Woolsey’s decision in the Ulysses obscenity case and reveals the many ways copyright has affected publication of Joyce’s work and the scholarly and aesthetic use of his words. These discussions show how reading Joyce alongside the law enriches both legal studies and literary scholarship.  A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

Books about the work of James Joyce are an academic industry. Most of them are unreadable and esoteric. Adrian Hardiman's book is both highly readable and strikingly original. He spent years researching Joyce's obsession with the legal system, and the myriad references to notorious trials in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce was fascinated by and felt passionately about miscarriages of justice, and his view of the law was coloured by the potential for grave injustice when policemen and judges are given too much power. Hardiman recreates the colourful, dangerous world of the Edwardian courtrooms of Dublin and London, where the death penalty loomed over many trials. He brings to life the eccentric barristers, corrupt police and omnipotent judges who made the law so entertaining and so horrifying. This is a remarkable evocation of a vanished world, though Joyce's scepticism about the way evidence is used in criminal trials is still highly relevant.

The text collects essays about James Joyce's writings in the context of law and legal history from major scholars of early twentieth-century literature and culture. It argues that reading Joyce alongside the law supports and enriches current strategies in legal studies and literary scholarship. It includes chapters about Joyce in relation to laws governing citizenship, language, libel, copyright, censorship, obscenity, trademark, alcohol, public space, marital infidelity, and tenancy. Joyce's work can be seen as critiquing these and other legal regimes.

James Joyce and Censorship is the first book to tell the fascinating story of the trials of Ulysses. Based on extensive archival research, it is also the first study of the trials to analyze their influence on the reception and composition of Ulysses in the context of Joyce's lifelong struggle with the censors, to evaluate their significance as an important turning point in the history of censorship, and to emphasize their relevance to contemporary debates regarding freedom of literary expression.

Since 1958, twenty-five men and two women have forced the Supreme Court to consider whether the Constitution's promises of equal protection apply to gay Americans. Here Joyce Murdoch and Deb Price reveal how the nation's highest court has reacted to these cases--from the surprising 1958 victory of a tiny homosexual magazine to the 2000 defeat of a gay Eagle Scout. A triumph of investigative reporting, Courting Justice gives us an inspiring new perspective on the struggle for civil rights in America.

Recipient of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Nonfiction “The arrival of a significant young nonfiction writer . . . A measured yet bravura performance.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times James Joyce’s big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of Ulysses was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. Joyce, along with some of the most important publishers and writers of his era, had to fight for years to win the freedom to publish it. The Most Dangerous Book tells the remarkable story surrounding Ulysses, from the first stirrings of Joyce’s inspiration in 1904 to the book’s landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933. Written for ardent Joyceans as well as novices who want to get to the heart of the greatest novel of the twentieth century, The Most Dangerous Book is a gripping examination of how the world came to say Yes to Ulysses.