The anthology on my desk is titled Poetry of the Law: From Chaucer to the Present, edited by David Kader (a law professor at Arizona State) and Michael Stanford (a public defender in Phoenix). I’m both a lawyer and a poetry critic, so asking me to discuss this book would seem to present an especially harmonious pairing of subject and analyst—like handing an animal cracker recipe to a zoologist-pastry chef. And indeed, flipping through, I find plenty of work that appeals to me as a reader of poems who is also, when necessary, a filer of briefs. We have some well-chosen passages from Spenser (“Then up arose a person of deepe reach, / . . . / That well could charme his tongue, and time his speach”), an intriguing poetic performance from the seminal jurist Sir William Blackstone (“The Lawyer’s Farewell to His Muse”), and a number of more recent efforts that, while mixed in quality, manage to give the reader a sense of the ways in which contemporary poetry can encompass legal subjects.