Modernism at the Bar: Robert Spoo's Modernism and the Law

Robert Spoo's new book, Modernism and the Law (2018), presents itself as "the first book to survey the legal contexts of transatlantic Anglo-American modernist culture." This it does admirably, as it ranges over a series of issues that it often shows to be related: obscenity and censorship; copyright, patronage and courtesy; and privacy, publicity, defamation, and blackmail, to list the book's three central chapters, which are bookended by chapters on Oscar Wilde and Ezra Pound.