Legal Limits

In this volume of essays, Nicholas’s subjects are the law and literature and the connections between them. He notes that both professions demand the skilled use of language and yet few novelists write about the law and few lawyers write novels. Hasluck is an accomplished writer and he has written a fascinating book. Read full review… - T E Young, Australian Club newsletter, June 2014 In the opening chapter of his latest book, Nicholas Hasluck, a former judge of the Supreme Court of Western Australia, remarks that our legal system depends upon stories being well told. For this reason, among others that Hasluck goes on to explore in the chapters that follow, literature has much to teach lawyers, and especially advocates. Hasluck reflects on the lessons a lawyer can draw from literature. However, the book also has the air of a memoir about it. … the book is a collection of reflections and reminiscences from a life cunningly - and successfully - spent in both disciplines. - Juliet Curtin, Bar News, Autumn 2014 There is much in the book to interest the general reader as well as the lawyer, and the often complex issues it raises for consideration are made readily comprehensible.Legal Limits should be required reading in any university course on the inter-relations of law and literature. The post-structuralists and deconstructionists within literature departments have done their best to undermine a system of law they view as hegemonic and in need of white-anting, and it is important that more constructive and convincing cross-disciplinary studies such as Hasluck’s be read alongside them. Read full review… - Philip Ayres, Quadrant, March 2014 UWA University News, 24 Feb 2014 Read full article… The Australian, 6 Feb 2014 Read full article… Book review in The Australian, 1-2 February 2014 Read full review… Book review in SMH, 25 January 2014 Read full review… Justinian, On the Couch interviews Nicholas Hasluck Read full interview…

Nicholas Hasluck AM, QC studied law at the University of Western Australia, then Wadham College, Oxford, before returning to Australia to become a practising lawyer in Perth. He served as a part-time President of the Equal Opportunity Tribunal (WA) for ten years prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court of Western Australia in May 2000. He has now retired from the bench. He is well-known also as the author of 11 works of fiction including The Bellarmine Jug, winner of The Age Book of the Year Award. He served as Chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council and later as Chair of the Commonwealth Writers Prize. He was recently awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Western Australia.