Where There's Life, There's Lawsuits: Not Altogether Serious Ruminations on Law and Life

Louis A. Knafla is a professor of history at the University of Calgary,
the co-editor of Law, Society, and the State: Essays in Modern Legal
History, and the author of Lords of the Western Bench.

Miller has written columns for The Lawyers Weekly for more than two
decades, and is known more widely for his popular books on the life of
the law, including Ardor in the Court! and Naked Promises. In this work,
he portrays episodes of the law as human tragicomedy and sees case law
“as literature, a cultural artefact with its own mythic
foundations.” The book’s 63 essays are organized by legal
categories: Crime and Punishment, Property, Torts, Contracts and
Commerce, Intellectual Property, Family Law, Lawmakers and Lawbreakers,
Human Rights, and Libel, Slander, and Contempt. Embedded in the essays
are chronologically arranged short stories.

Most of the essays are not very interesting or amusing. In the essay on
Robin Hood, for example, we learn why some of the Nottingham city
leaders did not like the Robin Hood attribution; the Robin Hood story
itself is related in just seven lines, and efforts to amuse the reader
by injecting business, party politics, and downsizing fall rather flat.
The essay on Sir Francis Bacon incorrectly calls him the father of the
courts of equity (which predate him by several centuries), considers him
a better lawyer than Sir Edward Coke for reasons that are never
explained, and confuses the common law–equity debate of the period. A
major problem with the book is the awkward transitions between the
essays and the short stories. There are some amusing stories here, but
it requires a patient reader to find them.