Book Review: Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663913502278 |
| Author | Marco Wan |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Social & Legal Studies
22(4) 583-599
Book Reviews
ª The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663913502278
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DESMOND MANDERSON, Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012,
pp. 224, ISBN 9780415598279, £75 (hbk).
How can literature contribute to the study of law? This question, which lies at the heart of
the ‘law and literature’ enterprise, has generated some of the most creative interdisciplin-
ary scholarship in recent years. Desmond Manderson’s Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of
Law is a valuable addition to this burgeoning area of inquiry. His analysis is premised on
an imaginative, patient, and sustained reading of a single novel by David Herbert Lawr-
ence, the Kangaroo referred to in the title of Manderson’s book.
The choice of a DH Lawrence novel as the entry point into a discussion of law and
literature seems eminently sensible, and at the same time, the focus on Kangaroo is a
pleasantly surprising one. Lawrence’s work has long courted legal controversy. In
1929, the police raided an exhibition of his paintings at the Warren Gallery in London,
after members of the public complained about their explicit eroticism and even perver-
sity. Thirteen pieces of artwork were confiscated, and Lawrence only managed to regain
possession of them with the promise that he would never exhibit them in England again.
There is also the trial of Penguin Books for the publication of Lady Chatterley’s
Lover; the court case constituted a major public event when it took place in 1960 and
remains a key moment in literary history. Penguin had to show that Lady Chatterley’s
Lover was of sufficient literary merit in order for its publication to come under the
‘public good’ defense of the Obscene Publications Act, and much of the cross-
examination revolved around what it meant for a piece of writing to be considered
as literature. The great and the good of the literary world, including EM Forster,
Richard Hoggart, Rebecca West, and Walter Allen, lined up to testify to the artistic
value of the novel, and the jury eventually returned a verdict of ‘not guilty’. To date,
the legally inflected scholarship on Lawrence has tended to return to these episodes,
while the jurisprudential significance of his wider corpus has remained largely unex-
plored. By staging an encounter between legal theory and a novel that at first glance
seems to have little to do with law, Kangaroo Courts does much more than further our
understanding of the legal context of Lawrence’s work. It inaugurates a new way...
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