Kevin Curran is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and general editor of Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy. His books include Shakespeare’s Theater of Judgment (2024), Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies (2017), Renaissance Personhood (2020) and Shakespeare and Judgment (2017).

• Introduction, Kevin Curran; Part I: Staging Judgment: Deliberation in the Plays; 1. Preventive Justice in Measure for Measure, Virginia Lee Strain; 2. Believing in Ghosts, in Part: Judgment and Indecision in Hamlet, Vivasvan Soni; 3. Shakespeare’s Law and Plowden’s Authority; Constance Jordan; Part II: Audience Judgment: Deliberation in the Theater; 4. "Gently to hear, kindly to judge": Minds at Work in Henry V, Katherine B. Attié; 5. "Practis[ing] Judgment with the Disposition of Natures": Measure for Measure, the "Discoursive" Common Law, and the "Open Court" of the Theater, Carolyn Sale; 6. The Laws of Measure for Measure; Paul Yachnin; 7. Prospero’s Plea: Judgment, Invention, and Political Form in The Tempest; Kevin Curran; Part III: The Ethics of Judgment; 8. Antinomian Shakespeare: English Drama and Confession across the Reformation Divide, John Parker; 9. Bracketed Judgment, "Un-humanizing," and Conversion in The Merchant of Venice, Sanford Budick; 10. The Judgment of the Critics that Makes us Tremble: "Distributing Complicities" in Recent Criticism of King Lear; Richard Strier.

Curran’s book is a perfect example not only of how significant law was to Shakespeare but also of the theoretical and political resources it offers to literary criticism today, a lesson extended even further by a significant collection of essays that Curran has also edited on Shakespeare and Judgment.