Literary novels with courtroom dramas?

I know there was a long (funny) thread on here about liteary fiction by genre, but can anyone think of any literary novels around crime/courtroom dramas (can be historical)?
Thank you!

I know I asked this question a while ago - I'm just off to see if I can find the thread . . .

ETA Definitely worth starting with To Kill a Mockingbird - probably the most famous of them all.

ETA (again) Well, this (http://www.librarything.com/topic/106068#2589764) was where I asked (#77 onwards) though I see I didn't actually specify that they should be lit-fic. Sadly, there don't seem to be that many around but I'll be glued to this thread for a while now to see what people come up with. Sorry I couldn't be more help.

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Merchant of Venice -- There's a long courtroom scene when Shylock is tried for his crimes.

The story of the Amistad:

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/book/amistad

The trial of Socrates?

SCAPEGOATS OF THE EMPIRE (the book the superb Australian movie "Breaker Morant" was based on).

COMPULSION by Meyer Levin (fictionalized account of Leopold-Loeb trial).

THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG by Norman Mailer.

The Brothers Karamazov has a pretty famous court scene. I've just gotten to that part of the book.

Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver.

Aw, 6 beat me to it re: the brothers K. Ah well.

There is a court scene or two in Instance of the Fingerpost - does that count as a literary novel?

There's a long courtroom scene when Shylock is tried for his crimes.

Actually, there isn't.

The Apology for sure. That's the classic of classics. Fun to read as well.

Les Miserables has a very important courtroom scene quite early in the book.

Yeah, good catch #9! I think the courtroom scene tries that other guy who borrowed from Shylock. Allesandro? Antonio? I know it starts with an A.

> 11

Antonio. It was a civil action by Shylock against Antonio to collect on a debt.

I have never seen it performed but I read it once. It is funny (not ha ha) how anti-Semitic so many once-popular novels and plays are. I was kind of shocked when I read Ivanhoe too.

Brilliant, thanks for all these.

>13 anna_in_pdx:
Ivanhoe has a pretty impressive courtroom scene itself, of course.

What about A passage to India?

I've never read it, but QB VII presumably also falls into the category.

ETA: tagmash here: http://www.librarything.com/tag/courtroom,+literary%20fiction - but I think you could quibble with one or other half of the tag "literary fiction" for several of the books on the list. I'm a great fan of the Rumpole stories, for instance, but they surely count as intelligent genre writing rather than literature. And the same for Grisham.

It also occurs to me that there's a lot of legal drama in Dickens, not all of it in court, of course, but there are some wonderful courtroom scenes like the breach-of-promise action in The Pickwick Papers.

15: After reading that, I just remembered all the law issues in the Trollope book, Dr. Thorne, which were actually charming (and the names of the lawyers were very Dickensian) but like Dickens, all the law issues do not take place in the courtroom itself. They are estate / property / deeds and stuff like that.

Dickens's Bleak House revolves around a court case, but I don't remember if there are any actual courtroom scenes. Conrad's Lord Jim hinges on a court case. Then there's Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, which climaxes in a court martial. In the realm of drama, there is Aeschylus's Eumenides, which presents the inaugural case before Athens's tribunal of the Areopagus.

Justine is a minor character in Frankenstein, but her trial for the murder of little William is quite important.

Slightly off-topic, but worth rumination:

The Firm by Grisham. I know he gets the ire of this group and I've never bothered to read the book, but ... what about the movie by Sydney Pollack? It's a crackerjack legal thriller that focuses on tax law and mail fraud, back before Tom Cruise became Scientology's fanatical hand-puppet, aka slightly tolerable.

Read a couple Rumpole stories and loved them. A touch of the Wodehousian in them. Is there anything comparable in the US? A well-written legal comedy?

There's William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust which is comedy for sure, sort of borderline legal.

A Tale of Two Cities has a couple of courtroom scenes, including the one where Sydney Carton helps get Charles Darnay acquitted of spying for France.

19: I've read a bunch of Grisham and Turow, and they are fun, but I thought the point of the thread was "what else is out there?"