Shakespeare and the Law, with Len Niehoff

If you were Hamlet’s lawyer, would you advise he plead not guilty by reason of insanity? Would you consider his accidental slaying of Polonius to be murder or manslaughter? These are the kinds of questions that University of Michigan Law professor Len Niehoff asks his students to consider.

But why is it so important for lawyers to brush up their Shakespeare? According to Niehoff, Shakespeare and lawyers both think about everything.

Some of his plays illustrate the consequences of a lawless society. Others show how people respond to the miscarriage of justice or being excluded from the legal protection of human rights. And some others, like the case of Hamlet, can help students practice thinking like lawyers.

Niehoff’s book, Meeting Shakespeare at the Bar: Reading the Bard Through the Lens of the Law grew out of those classroom discussions. In this episode, Niehoff discusses his book, how his teaching practices have evolved, and what Shakespeare can teach lawyers about looking at problems from every possible angle.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published August 25, 2026. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Technical support was provided by Daniel Wanschura in Michigan and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Web production was handled by Megan Fraedrich. Transcripts are edited by Leonor Fernandez. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Len Niehoff serves as Professor from Practice at the University of Michigan Law School, where he teaches courses in Civil Procedure, Evidence, First Amendment, Law & Theology, Legal Ethics, Media Law, and Shakespeare & the Law. In the course of his career, he has taught thousands of law students.

He is the author or co-author of more than 100 publications, including five books, several book chapters, and dozens of law review and bar journal articles. He has also written numerous editorial columns for major newspapers. His most recent books are Meeting Shakespeare at the Bar: Reading the Bard Through the Lens of the Law (ABA, 2026) and Free Speech: From Core Values to Current Debates (Cambridge University Press, 2022). He is currently working on a book on the Salem Witch Trials. A variety of major media outlets have quoted him as an expert on legal issues, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, and National Public Radio.

A practicing litigator for more than 40 years, Niehoff has argued numerous cases in state and federal trial and appellate courts. He is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and for more than two decades has been listed in The Best Lawyers in America. In 2026, he received the John W. Reed Lawyer Legacy Award, periodically given to an educator whose influence on lawyers has elevated the quality of practice.

Niehoff has represented a wide array of print, broadcast, and online media entities in dozens of libel, privacy, freedom of information, and other matters. He has also served as newsroom counsel on projects that have won major awards, including a Pulitzer Prize (The Detroit News) and a Peabody Award (Michigan Public Radio). In addition, he has represented numerous colleges and universities in matters involving constitutional and higher education law. He served on the team that represented the University of Michigan in its historic defense of its affirmative action policies, which led to the United States Supreme Court decisions in the Gratz and Grutter cases. In 2023, he was honored by the Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus for his advocacy in support of the University of Michigan’s firearm regulation policy. He is currently Of Counsel to the Honigman law firm.

Niehoff holds degrees in English Literature and law from the University of Michigan. Further information about his work and writing can be found at his website, LenNiehoff.com.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

Shakespeare’s most famous trial scene takes place in The Merchant of Venice. Portia, posing as a legal scholar, makes an idealistic argument for mercy.

When that fails, she finds a legal loophole to save Antonio and uses Venetian law to turn the tables on Shylock.

The scene shows the power of the law to resolve a sticky conflict, but it also shows the biases and limitations of the law. Its rules don’t always satisfy the demands of poetic justice.

University of Michigan Law Professor Len Niehoff teaches a course on Shakespeare in which students read 12 plays with a special attention to the way law works.

Over the years he’s taught the class, Niehoff has found that reading Shakespeare this way can help students learn key concepts about the law, like the importance of tolerating uncertainty.

A legal reading can also reveal insights about the plays. It shows us how interested Shakespeare was in the law, its uses, and misuses.

Niehoff has developed his observations from the class into a book called Meeting Shakespeare at the Bar: Reading the Bard Through the Lens of the Law.

Here is Len Niehoff in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

——————-

BARBARA BOGAEV: Len, it’s wonderful to have you here on the podcast.

LEN NIEHOFF: Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s a delight to be here.

BOGAEV: Let’s start at the beginning. When did you first start thinking about Shakespeare and the law?

NIEHOFF: Well, I teach a lot of courses at the University of Michigan Law School, including a class called Civil Procedure that’s sort of famously difficult and technical. And in the course of teaching Civil Procedure—it’s a first-year, first-term Law school course—I noticed that somewhere toward the end of October, my students were running out of energy.

BOGAEV: You mean heads nodding at the desk?

NIEHOFF: Exactly. The in terrorem effect of starting law school was starting to wear off, and the horror of final examinations had not yet arrived, and so, I started throwing them a Halloween party at the end of October.

I felt like I needed for them to read something in connection with that, so I had them read The Crucible. My thought was that they’d probably read it before in high school or as undergraduates, but what I wanted them to see was that now after only just a couple of months of legal education, they saw things in that play that they hadn’t seen before—issues about evidence and due process, and the separation of church and state, so forth and so on.

It went really well, and the students seemed to love it, and the thought occurred to me, why not apply the same sort of idea to Shakespeare? Why not start reading Shakespeare’s plays, sort of, through the lens of the law and see what that might teach us both about Shakespeare’s plays and about the law itself?

BOGAEV: Well, I get why you would teach The Crucible, but why Shakespeare?

NIEHOFF: I also teach a seminar on Law and Theology, and there’s a great story about a theologian who’s asked on an airplane by a seatmate, “But what do theologians do?” and he said, “Theologians think about everything.” And so do lawyers, and so does Shakespeare, and so, turning to Shakespeare was a natural move. He worries about so many of the same things that lawyers and law professors and judges and law students do.

BOGAEV: Okay. Well, let’s start with the play that you start the book, which was an unusual choice, I thought, which is Titus Andronicus. And that’s, of course, the bloodbath play. It’s the Quentin Tarantino-est of his plays, as you point out. What does Titus have to do with the law?

NIEHOFF: Yeah, it’s a great question. In fact, it might seem at first that Titus has nothing to do with the law, right?

BOGAEV: Because anarchy.

NIEHOFF: Because it’s anarchy. He even says at one point, right, “Justice has fled the earth.” And why would you pick a play where justice has fled the earth to talk about Shakespeare and the law?

But Titus is, of course. a revenge play on steroids, and we tend to think of revenge as being in one box and the law as being in the other. But as my colleague at Michigan, Bill Miller, has pointed out, really there’s a lot more connection between law and revenge than we often like to admit.

I think that in Titus, Shakespeare does a really magnificent job of testing our assumptions about revenge and how it works and how we distinguish revenge from the law. We think about them as being separate. We like to think that as a civilized people, what we have is law, and revenge is like anarchy, as you said before. It’s the absence of law.

But it turns out that that’s actually not quite right. It turns out that there are many instances when revenge has rules. We sort of assign rules to revenge. We look for a kind of proportionality. We think that for revenge to be morally justified, there has to be this proportional quality to it.

I think one of the things that the play does quite brilliantly is to push back against that assumption that a proportionality of revenge or a mathematics of revenge is even an idea that makes sense or is possible for human beings to achieve.

BOGAEV: Oh, good. Let’s get into the specifics. How does Shakespeare explore the ambiguities of revenge and the law in Titus, which has a lot of math in it, right? Titus has lost 21 sons to the Goths right at the beginning of the play, which suggests he’s entitled to a lot of revenge, right?

NIEHOFF: Right. So, Titus has lost 21 sons. He wants to kill Tamora’s son. She wants nothing of that. She’s trying to talk him out of that. He says he’s entitled to it, and right away we have to hit the pause button and say, “How does this make any sense? How does the trade of one life for 21 lives make any sense?”

And by the way, when we’re talking about lives, Titus Andronicus was a great warrior. Surely, he’s responsible for the deaths of more than 21 of the opposition.

Once we start trying to figure out what the math is, it turns out that it’s not mathematics at all, right? So, he goes ahead and he kills Tamora’s son.

Well, now Tamora says, “Well, now I’m entitled to revenge.” And so now we look at all the things that she does, both on her own and in conspiracy with Aaron, and the tragic consequences of the plotting that they do together.

And at what point—you know, how are we measuring the revenge?—at what point does it cease to be proportional?

I think Shakespeare really quite brilliantly but indirectly shows us that the mathematics of revenge is an illusion. It’s something that we convince ourselves justifies our behavior but that, in the end, frankly, doesn’t make any sense at all.

BOGAEV: Okay, well Henry VI, Part II is next—another play that a lot of people don’t often see or read—but you write that legal issues arise in every act. So, maybe you could first remind everyone what’s going on, since these history plays are such a bear to remember.

NIEHOFF: What we have here, in essence, is a historical play that’s showing us the trajectory of power and that is introducing us to all of the various characters who are going to have a role around Henry VI’s rule.

Henry VI might seem like a very odd choice. If you’re looking for a dashing, heroic king figure, this would be the last person you would go looking at. But that’s exactly what makes the play interesting to Shakespeare. There are all of these machinations going on around Henry VI precisely because he’s not a very strong king and that makes him vulnerable, and so, we have all sorts of efforts by various players to take the center stage and steer the kingdom.

BOGAEV: Right, it’s a vacuum of power.

NIEHOFF: A vacuum of power. That’s exactly right.

BOGAEV: And you home in on Act One, Scene Three, in which everyone is accusing everyone else of bad deeds, and then Buckingham aims this zinger at Gloucester: “Thy cruelty in execution upon offenders hath exceeded law and left thee to the mercy of the law.” Confusing.

NIEHOFF: Very confusing, right?

BOGAEV: Parse that for us, please.

NIEHOFF: Gloucester sort of represents the law, right?

BOGAEV: Right.

NIEHOFF: And the accusation here is, “You’ve done too much law. You’ve done so much law that you were outside the law.”

And, in fact, that entire scene, the third scene of Act One, it’s like this. Everybody jockeying to see who can use the word “law” as if it had some sort of totemic power, as if the moment I invoke law, I must be legitimate. It must be that my claim is the one that matters.

BOGAEV: Right. Everyone claims the law is on their side, which I think is a very human belief.

NIEHOFF: A very human impulse, and yet, at the same time, can’t possibly be true in this case, right, that all the various competing players can’t be right. They can’t all be right that the law is on their side because there are too many sides.

BOGAEV: Right, and you say by the end, you also have the sense that when law results in any kind of justice, it’s by accident.

NIEHOFF: Oh, sure. I mean, take the duel, right, between the armorer and his assistant. We get the right result, but we get it only because one of the players is too drunk to actually, you know, fight the battle that they’ve been assigned to fight.

There are so many efforts here to get at the law, figure out what it is, you know. The law will be equal. It will dispense with everyone in a very even-handed way. But it doesn’t play out that way.

BOGAEV: No. You see that in the witchcraft trial in Henry VI, Part II in Act Two. The king finds everyone guilty: Eleanor, a witch, two priests, and a conjurer. All of them. All of them are guilty. But Eleanor gets a different sentence. So, what does the trial get at about the law? And why are any of these things important for your law students to plumb, to explore?

NIEHOFF: Yeah, Eleanor’s trial is offered as a signal that the law is going to be all right, that the law is going to do its work.

BOGAEV: Be impartial.

NIEHOFF: It’s going to be impartial. It’s going to be even-handed. And then when we look at this, it turns out that that’s not the case. It turns out that, as I say in the book, some witches are created more equal than others, right?

She gets an entirely different sentence, and we know that she gets an entirely different sentence only because of her station. That’s the only justification.

The whole play, I think, keeps testing what kind of thing might qualify as law. What are the things that we associate with law and equality, the absence of bias, impartiality? And it’s as if throughout the play, Shakespeare keeps testing them and finding things wanting.

Popular sentiment in favor of the law seems like something that might be a basis on which we would test law or figure out whether law made sense. But then we get Jack Cade, and to the extent that he represents the popular approach to law, the populist approach to law, the consequences are, of course, horrifying.

BOGAEV: Right. And now we’re in Act Three, and we’ve come to the legal profession’s most famous Shakespeare reference. So, remind us who Jack Cade is and how he figures in the play at this moment, and the context for, “Kill all the lawyers.”

NIEHOFF: Jack Cade is a usurper. He is often described as being an anarchist, which I think is actually not quite right because I think Jack Cade isn’t striving toward “no law.” He’s striving toward “Jack Cade is law.”

BOGAEV: His law.

NIEHOFF: It’s his law, and that’s what he wants to put in place. And so, we have him essentially in the setting of meeting with his co-conspirators. And this character named Dick the Butcher says, “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

And this is the most reproduced statement on mugs and T-shirts and so forth and so on that lawyers buy at conferences. It was a laugh line then, it’s a laugh line now.

But it’s also a deeply sinister line because, of course, what Dick the Butcher is targeting is nothing less than the very rule of law. He understands that if you would do away with the rule of law, the way to do that is to do away with the people who understand the law, and that’s the lawyers.

BOGAEV: So, making the point that you’re just a very short step from populism to tyranny.

NIEHOFF: That’s exactly right. I think that this is an idea that was very important to Shakespeare—it’s reflected to some degree in the structure of Macbeth—this notion that the line, the space between civilization and anarchy or tyranny, is so incredibly small, and that we can move from that one space to the other space so quickly—and sometimes with what seems like nothing more than a change in personnel. You know, not big, giant structural changes like revolutions, but just a change in who’s occupying a particular office, and all of a sudden, it seems like everything is at stake.

So, this is a terribly important theme always, but I think particularly right now when people are worried about the status of the rule of law, it makes the play really even more relevant than it is, perhaps, at other times.

BOGAEV: And it’s such a grim indictment, again, of the law. You’re teaching these law students, so, what do you want them to come away with? And I’m thinking that actually while you’re talking this whole time that you say in your preface that much of the value in reading Shakespeare is in the questions that he raises.

NIEHOFF: You know, there’s this wonderful quotation from Robert Pirsig. He says, “In the high country of the mind, one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty.”

A lot of what we do in law school is what I would call occupying “the high country of the mind” and we therefore deal a lot with uncertainty. We’re constantly looking at problems, at questions that don’t have any obvious solutions, don’t have any easy answers, where both sides have arguments that seem rational and reasonable, and what we do in law school is we continually test that, and push it, and think about it, and probe it, and ask. Shakespeare is so much occupying territory in the high country of the mind, and so, what he’s interested in is exactly that problem of uncertainty.

BOGAEV: And the nuance and the moral ambiguity.

NIEHOFF: Exactly.

BOGAEV: And that brings us to Hamlet, I think.

NIEHOFF: Yes.

BOGAEV: Okay, I want to just fire some questions, legal questions, at you about Hamlet. How does the law view Hamlet’s accidental murder of Polonius and Hamlet’s responsibility for Ophelia’s drowning/suicide?

NIEHOFF: Oh, there’s so much to say about Hamlet and responsibility. It’s as if you can almost see Shakespeare rubbing his hands together and saying, “How many different explorations of responsibility can I do?”

BOGAEV: A challenge to himself.

NIEHOFF: “How many problems can I create that maybe I then can’t solve?” So, Polonius is a really interesting case, right? He thinks that he’s killing Claudius, but he actually kills Polonius.

BOGAEV: So, is it manslaughter? What is that?

NIEHOFF: So, the law would transfer his intent. The law would say, “Look, the fact that you didn’t mean to kill Polonius is irrelevant. You killed somebody and you intended to kill somebody, so we just transfer your intent from this person to that person.”

So, from the law’s perspective, the question is relatively easily answered. But the law and morality don’t always, you know, completely overlap. If we think about it from a moral perspective, the question might seem more problematic to us. After all, Hamlet probably was morally justified in taking revenge against Claudius.

If we think about how we envision a justified act of revenge, it’s where a wrong has been done, the response is proportional, the law isn’t going to fix it. You have to take justice into your own hands, or it won’t happen.

So, he’s probably morally justified in killing Claudius. But it’s just an accident, and he kills Polonius. So, from a moral perspective, we might actually think about it differently than we do from a legal perspective.

When it comes to Ophelia, there’s all sorts of problems, right? There’s the problem of causation if we assume that Ophelia, in one sense or another, intended to take her own life.

But the scenes that lead up to the death of Ophelia can look pretty abusive, and the idea that Hamlet, in essence, drove her to commit suicide is an intriguing moral question.

BOGAEV: Is it a legal one though?

NIEHOFF: You know, recently there have been a couple of cases that have looked at the question of whether you could basically push someone towards suicide—knowing that they were vulnerable, knowing that they were emotionally fragile—and then be held criminally responsible for it. That question, or at least the moral dimension of that, is present in Hamlet.

BOGAEV: Okay, very different question. Would you recommend Hamlet plead insanity if you were his lawyer? And what… is he manic depressive? I mean, does that hold water for an insanity defense? Which direction would you go?

NIEHOFF: If I were advising Hamlet, I don’t think I would advise pushing an insanity defense. He does know a hawk from a handsaw. He does know right from wrong. I mean, unless you buy into the idea that Hamlet’s just a sociopath, I think it’s really hard to make the argument that he doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong, and in a very general sense, that’s the way we think about it in the law.

BOGAEV: Okay, I want to talk about Lear. It’s hard to talk about Lear briefly, but a little briefly, because it, of course, starts with the love trial.

Lear announces he’ll divide his kingdom into three parts, and he’ll gift the most valuable one to the daughter who loves him the most. Cordelia famously refuses to play the game, and this standoff between Lear and Cordelia drives the plot, the whole rest of the play. So, what does your lawyer brain make of this failure to compromise?

NIEHOFF: Yeah, you know, the vast majority of disputes end up being compromised. The vast majority of civil cases end up settling. The vast majority of criminal cases end up with a plea bargain. One of the things that lawyers have to think about quite a lot is what makes for a sensible compromise, and the more challenging proposition is, how do you work your client toward a sensible compromise when they may be resistant toward it?

When you’re looking at this opening scene in Lear, if you read it again through the lens of the law, one of the things that jumps out at you is that we’re really just one relatively modest compromise away from avoiding the entire sequence of disasters and tragedies that follow.

And the question is, why can’t they get there? Why can’t Cordelia sort of shrug and say, “Yeah, it’s a crazy request, but, you know, it’s my father. I’m going to put up—I’ve been putting up…”

BOGAEV: “He’s getting old.”

NIEHOFF: “He’s getting old.” Yeah. And, you know, why can’t Lear say, “It was just a game, you know? It’s just a little demonstration to see, you know, who would say the sweetest things about me.”

You can imagine all sorts of rational processes by which two people move together and the whole thing ends abruptly, and that just can’t happen here.

This is one of the things that lawyers struggle with very often, which is, it may be perfectly clear that as a matter of logic the outcome should be some sort of resolution, some sort of compromise. But particularly with family members, there is no conversation that stands on its own. There is no arrangement that stands on its own. There is no exchange that stands on its own. Every one of them—

BOGAEV: There’s always history.

NIEHOFF: There’s always history. Every one of them.

BOGAEV: It’s always trauma.

NIEHOFF: It’s always trauma. Every one of them comes with its own set of checked and carry-on emotional baggage, right?

And so, they just can’t move past that point. I think every lawyer who reads King Lear probably winces at that opening scene because you can see what the right result is, and you can see that they’re not going to be able to do it.

BOGAEV: Okay, to the second element of legal import in Lear, legitimacy. This comes up, of course, in regard to Edmund who’s Gloucester’s illegitimate son, and early modern English law does not count him as fully human because of that.

So, what light does Shakespeare’s exploration of Edmund shed on modern-day legal debates, which are very pressing now about who should be granted full protections as a human being? And I’m just thinking of the obvious situations or issues like immigration or abortion.

NIEHOFF: Sure. One of the things that, you know, periodically in law school, we get so engaged in looking at the details and the finer points that you can lose the grander picture of the themes that the law touches on. And one of the things you could miss is how much time the law spends declaring who does and does not count as a human being.

So, Edmund is one of those people who has, by the law, been declared outside the law. The law says you don’t—for purposes of our concern—you don’t count. We might look at that and read it in the context of a Shakespeare play and say, “Well, that’s quaint and old-fashioned that you would have a notion like that.”

But when we look at the current legal issues that we struggle with, and have struggled with for the past 250 years, there are a lot of those issues. The key issues are issues about who the law does or does not count as a human being. Slavery is obviously such an issue, and I talk about the Dred Scott decision from the Supreme Court in the book; immigration—who does or doesn’t count as a human being in the current context of the immigration debate; as you say, abortion. Even abortion is in many ways an argument over who does and doesn’t count as a person within the laws, who does or doesn’t count as a human being.

BOGAEV: Corporations.

NIEHOFF: Corporations. Citizens United.

BOGAEV: Weirdly.

NIEHOFF: Exactly, right? And so, this idea that Edmund is exploring here about “the law has placed me outside of it,” and the problem, of course, that the play presents is that once you put someone outside the law, why should you expect them to follow the law? Once you put them outside the law, why do you think that society has any claim over them anymore?

Edmund basically says you don’t, right? “Once you’ve put me outside the law, then I’m subject only to nature’s law,” and his version of nature’s law is essentially, the strongest will survive and the most powerful will take over.

And so, this business that we engage in all the time within the law of declaring who does and doesn’t count as a human being turns out to have this tremendous peril attached to it. Every time we put somebody outside the law, we create a risk, a danger. Not only a risk to them of dehumanizing them, of treating them as less than fully human, but a risk that actually also comes from them because we have by design placed them outside of legal restrictions.

BOGAEV: So, is this a warning to your students? Is this what you want them to take away from studying this play? Or are you really training them in nuanced thinking?

NIEHOFF: I think Lear has lots of warnings. I like to say one of the warnings is it makes me nervous about early retirement. But I think that one of the things that we’re looking at here is unintended consequences.

I say to my students all the time that you’re going to learn a lot of laws in law school, but the one law that you’re going to see over and over again is the law of unintended consequences. We move a lever here, we make a decision here, we implement a policy here, and lo and behold, it turns out that we’ve also affected something in some other place. That’s one of the things that I want them to take away from the legitimacy problem that Edmund presents.

BOGAEV: Okay, we have to leave time for The Merchant of Venice and Portia, Shakespeare’s supposedly brilliant lawyer character. But before we even talk about her, it must be such a tricky play to teach, right? Between the anti-Semitism and the “problem play” issue, it’s such a minefield. So, how do you present it?

NIEHOFF: It is a minefield, and this is where being in law school helps, because so much of what we do is walk through a minefield. I sometimes teach a course in First Amendment law where we deal with things like hate speech and obscenity and all sorts of really, really difficult, difficult problems. So, if you get used to anything in law school other than being uncertain about things, one of the other things you get used to is the fact that we are constantly having hard conversations. So, in that sense, Merchant of Venice turns out to be a particularly good play to talk about in law school because we talk about so much hard stuff.

BOGAEV: Okay. Well, let’s look at the trial, Act Four, Scene One. Antonio’s been arrested for failing to pay his debt to Shylock, and Shylock’s demanding his pound of Antonio’s flesh, and then Portia enters in the guise of a lawyer or counselor, and she makes her famous “quality of mercy” speech.

NIEHOFF: Yeah, so this is a much-debated speech, right, by Portia. This is a much-debated performance, and you can divide the camps roughly along these lines. There are those people who say, “Oh my gosh, look at how brilliant this argument is. She found this amazing loophole.” And the amazing loophole is, “Aha, the bond only allows you to collect the flesh. It doesn’t allow you to collect the blood. So, unless you can do this in a way that doesn’t shed any blood, you’ve got a problem.”

And then we have the other group that says, “What a stupid argument.” Because after all, every agreement, every contract has implied terms, and it’s just implicit that if you can take the pound of flesh, you can take whatever blood comes with that or whatever bleeding happens.

BOGAEV: Implied Terms. Capital I, capital T. That’s understood.

NIEHOFF: Exactly. It’s in the fine print, right, Barbara? It’s in the fine print at the bottom, you know. We get to take this other stuff, too.

I like to think about it a little bit differently. I think Portia’s argument is a brilliant argument, but for a different reason than a lot of people think. I divide the argument into two parts. At the very beginning, she’s talking about the quality of mercy, and she’s talking to Shylock, ostensibly. But I think she’s really talking to the Duke. I think she wants the Duke to see that she’s making this beautiful speech in the presence of Shylock, and Shylock is so cold-hearted that he won’t heed it. He won’t pay attention to it.

BOGAEV: So, she’s both softening up the judge but also warning him that this is a dangerous man.

NIEHOFF: That’s exactly right. And then she starts talking to the Duke about how he has to strictly enforce the bond, but I think what she’s really doing there is she’s trying to lure Shylock into saying something. She’s trying to lure Shylock into buying into the strict construction of the bond.

BOGAEV: The most literal construction of the bond.

NIEHOFF: The literal construction. She wants him to be a literalist. And once he’s completely bought into that, he’s lost his ability to object to it when it backfires on him. He’s lost his ability to object when it turns out that he didn’t see what the next chess move was going to be.

And I think this is great instruction for lawyers, especially young lawyers. To understand that very often in court, you’re not talking to the person it looks like you’re talking to. If I’m cross-examining a witness, I’m really talking to the jury. If I’m talking to a three-judge panel answering one judge’s question, I may know that judge is never going to vote my way. I’m actually talking to a different judge who I think might vote my way.

So, I think students understanding that this is how this strategy worked, why this strategy worked, who she was talking to when she was talking to them—I think it’s a wonderful educational vehicle.

BOGAEV: And you said it at the beginning, you said her performance in the court, this is how you teach them performing.

NIEHOFF: Sure.

BOGAEV: How to perform in front of the jury, in front of the judge.

NIEHOFF: Yeah. Advocacy is essentially a performance, right?

BOGAEV: That’s the art of it.

NIEHOFF: That’s the art of it, exactly.

BOGAEV: Just to close the Shylock loop though, Shylock’s destroyed by the end of the play. He loses at least half his fortune, he loses his daughter to a Christian, and he’s forbidden to practice his faith. And Portia, she doesn’t show much or any mercy to him, and most audiences come to dislike her by the end of the play. What about you?

NIEHOFF: Yeah—

BOGAEV: She’s your lawyer proxy.

NIEHOFF: So, this is fodder for a lot of great discussion with my students, because, you know, there’s a kind of amorality to the way in which lawyers have to do their job.

If your client comes to you and says, “This is my goal,” and the goal is legal, you may think it’s a morally obnoxious idea or that it’s a bad idea, but if it’s legal and if you can help them, you don’t adopt their position by virtue of helping them with it. Lawyers routinely help clients with things that they wouldn’t do themselves or that they don’t perhaps morally approve of, but the client has the right to do it, and they’re trying to help them get to their goal…

BOGAEV: So, you’re one person in court and another person outside of court?

NIEHOFF: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, and that’s another very long conversation. But this is a great opportunity for students to start to think about this because, of course, Portia doesn’t have to take this case. She could pass on it. She’s really not even a lawyer. But for students to start thinking about, what are the things where even though legally it might be appropriate for me to help the client, what are the things where I’m going to say, “You know, you’re just going to have to find somebody else to help you to do that?”

And if there are things that that you just can’t do, lines that you simply won’t cross, then it’s important to know what they are and to start thinking about that even when you’re in law school.

BOGAEV: Okay, well, switching gears, where do you think Shakespeare acquired his knowledge of the law?

NIEHOFF: There’s certainly evidence that he had knowledge of the law, including a number of legal terms. There are references in many of the plays to legal principles. Where he got it from? Probably a mixture of being a businessman himself, being exposed to lawyers in conversation, the legal difficulties that his father went through.

BOGAEV: Oh, right. Everybody was always suing each other. It’s so litigious.

NIEHOFF: Oh, tremendously litigious. You know, we have all these records of Shakespeare involved in this or that—not paying his taxes and so forth and so on. So, I think that some amount of it came from experience.

I think the question that interests me is also, what did he think of the law? You know, he obviously got some data about it, information about it, but what did he think about it?

It feels to me we have so much in common with him. Because on one hand, Shakespeare sees the law as the rule of law, as this thing that preserves civilization, this thing that holds us together and allows us to have an ordered society. And on the other hand, he clearly recognizes all the ways in which the law can be abused—the way in which it can promote inequality, the way in which law can be thrown around as a term that really doesn’t mean anything, the grave injustices that can be perpetuated through the law.

So, he has this tremendously complicated relationship with the law, I think. And I think we do too. I think we see all of those aspects of the law in our own engagement with legal systems, legal principles, and legal issues.

BOGAEV: And so, writing this book and thinking so deeply about Shakespeare and the law, has it changed in any way how you practice law?

NIEHOFF: Well, I think that one of the beauties of reading Shakespeare for lawyers, and really for everyone, is that he was this tremendous master of perspective. You know, you take any problem, and you just look at it from so many different angles and so many different points of view, and it’s, in a sense, so respectful of the human soul and all of its varieties, right?

And I think that that is a lesson that we just can’t learn too often: that the way to the right answer, the way to the best argument, the way to the best resolution of a case, is just looking at it from every perspective that you can and trying to imagine how everyone is going to see what presents as basically being the same thing.

I think there’s almost no better training for a lawyer, or maybe even better training for being a human being, than reading Shakespeare because it forces us to go through those exercises of perspective.

BOGAEV: Thank you so much for that and thank you for the book. It’s been wonderful talking with you.

NIEHOFF: It’s been wonderful talking with you. I’m just delighted to be here.

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KARIM-COOPER: That was Len Niehoff, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Meeting Shakespeare at the Bar: Reading the Bard Through the Lens of the Law is out now from the American Bar Association.

This episode was produced by Matt Frascica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Daniel Wanschura in Michigan and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Megan Fraedrich. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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