Law and Literature, Luke Sheehan interviews David Langwallner for Village podcasts. First episode
MichaelThe Law and Literature Podcast Series — An Introduction
What began as a modest proposal evolved into an ambitious five-part podcast series: five hour-long conversations recorded in an intense burst between demanding court commitments. The result is expansive, discursive, and unapologetically searching — a sustained meditation on law, literature, morality, and the corrosion of principle in modern legal culture.
At its core lies a concern: that we inhabit an increasingly diminished intellectual universe — not least within the legal profession. The series confronts the rise of technocratic careerism, the erosion of moral seriousness, the collapse of the distinction between legal guilt and moral innocence, and the growing denudation of the rule of law both domestically and internationally. It interrogates nihilism, public contempt for lawyers, and the profession’s complicity in its own moral decline.
The structure is chronological but thematic.
Podcast One explores the great 19th- and 20th-century literary anatomists of law and extremism: Camus, Dostoevsky, Melville, Dickens and Kafka. From The Fall to The Trial, from Bartleby to Bleak House, the episode examines alienation, bureaucratic terror, legal drudgery, false accusation, and the seductive pull of authority.
Podcast Two moves back to the Renaissance and Enlightenment: Shakespeare’s moral ambiguities, Cervantes’ legal absurdities, Swift’s savage indictment of lawyers and inequality, Johnson and Pope’s scepticism, and Voltaire’s crusade against miscarriages of justice. It is an excavation of the intellectual inheritance we are in danger of losing.
Podcast Three centres on injustice — racial demonisation, establishment “fit-ups”, false allegations, show trials, and wrongful exonerations. Zola’s J’Accuse, the Dreyfus Affair, The Crucible, the Salem trials, Sacco and Vanzetti, and notorious Irish cases form a grim itinerary through corruption, hysteria and institutional failure.
Podcast Four asks whether judicial writing can rise to the level of literature. It considers Holmes, Hardiman, Denning and others — moments of intellectual brilliance alongside stark moral failure — exploring how judgments can both defend liberty and entrench injustice.
Podcast Five turns to advocacy as narrative art. From Clarence Darrow’s plea in Leopold and Loeb to legendary cross-examinations and closing speeches, it examines the courtroom as theatre — technical craft fused with storytelling discipline.
Podcast Six, conceived in response to global upheaval, confronts the breakdown of constitutionalism, the erosion of international norms, and the resurgence of informal justice — from blood feuds in Njáls Saga to gangster capitalism in The Godfather and Sciascia’s Sicily. It asks what happens when law loses moral authority.
Throughout, the conversations retain a dialogic energy: probing, testing, clarifying. They are animated by the conviction that truth — la vérité — is indispensable, and that when law matters most, it must be morally defensible or it will cease to command allegiance.
For its author, the series represents not an ending but a reckoning — a form of catharsis. The light has not gone out. But there is an autumnal clarity: an awareness that in an age when just law is most urgently required, it is too often least respected.
Where can you listen?
