Western Law, Russian Justice: Dostoevsky, the Jury Trial, and the Law

Gary Rosenshield offers a new interpretation of Dostoevsky’s greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov. He explores Dostoevsky’s critique and exploitation of the jury trial for his own ideological agenda, both in his journalism and his fiction, contextualizing his portrayal of trials and trial participants (lawyers, jurors, defendants, judges) in the political, social, and ideological milieu of his time. Rosenshield presents Dostoevsky’s critique in terms of the main notions of the critical legal studies movement in the United States, showing how, more than one hundred and twenty years ago, Dostoevsky explicitly dealt with the same problems that the law-and-literature movement has been confronting from the 1980s to the present.