“Out goes ahistorical Power, and in comes historically specific Jurisdiction. Thanks to Bradin Cormack’s searching and original study, literary critics have a newly usable instrument of analysis: in his hands the concept of Jurisdiction reveals afresh not only the legal narratives of literary texts, but also the literary practice of those very texts.”

James Simpson, Douglas P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English, Harvard University

“There could be no stronger argument for integrating the study of literature and the law than this book. A Power to Do Justice is a magisterial accomplishment: for its formidable scholarship, its conceptual sophistication, and its stunning sensitivity to language, both poetic and prescriptive.”

Margreta de Grazia, Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Professor of Humanities, University of Pennsylvania

“In this learned and legible book, Bradin Cormack shifts our attention from sovereignty and its others, to jurisdiction as the persistently problematic practice of representing and enacting legal authority. He convincingly demonstrates that Elizabethan and Tudor literature was a rich site for working out massively important material shifts in the construction of the legal order. A contribution to critical legal studies to be treasured; a contribution to critical legal history to be emulated; a contribution to our understanding of the relationship between law and literature that —to my complete delight—transcends the parochial terms in which the two fields of interpretive practice have typically encountered one another.”

Janet Halley, Royall Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

“In A Power to do Justice, Bradin Cormack brilliantly revises our way of thinking about the relationships between literature, law, and ‘power’ in early modern England. He encourages us to think of law as constituted by jurisdictional boundaries, and shows us how profoundly the poetic fictions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are engaged in reimagining these boundaries, and all that they make possible. The dialogue between the disciplines isn’t just advanced by Cormack’s thoughtful and generous book: it is taken to a new level of theoretical and historical understanding.”

Lorna Hutson, Berry Professor of English Literature, University of St. Andrews

“This is a work of enormous erudition, enviable rigor, and considerable consequence. A Power to Do Justice offers a new model of law and literature, and it will act as a humanizing presence within jurisprudence for many years to come.”

Peter Goodrich, Professor of Law, Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University

"In this brilliant book, Brandin Cormack permanently reconfigures our understanding of the early modern literary imagination, showing that it was involved in legal culture to a degree not previously realized. Specifically, he demonstrates that literary works were one of the cultural areas in which new and contested forms of jurisdiction over people and territory were negotiated. . . . This vision of literature and law as mutually constitutive is the study of law and literature at its most fruitful and sophisticated."

Carla Spivack | H-Net Book Review

"In addition to demonstrating the relevance of literary sources to legal history, Cormack’s method shows how literary techniques can uncover what might otherwise be neglected within the historical record."

Bernadette Meyler | Law & History Review

"A significant book, which will contribute a great deal to our growing understanding of the relationship between law and literature in early modern Britain. . . . It is a painstaking and learned study that has clearly matured over several years and every chapter yields much information for the diligent reader."

Andrew Hadfield | Review of English Studies

"A fine and formidable book that makes an important cross-disciplinary intervention into early modern literary studies and English legal history. . . . [The author’s] insights are striking, and his patient exposition is thorough and persuasive. This is an impressive and illuminating book, generative of exciting new questions; it deserves a wide audience."

Elliott Visconsi | Journal of British Studies