In June 1971 after unsuccessfully defending the editors of the underground magazine Oz on charges of obscenity, the writer and barrister John Mortimer declared from the steps of London's Old Bailey that, ‘There cannot be a limit on the writer.’ The notion that literature is a zone of free expression, that ‘there cannot be a limit on the writer’, is an idealist one. As we shall see in this chapter, it represents a long-held ideal in Western literary culture, and one that has been vigorously opposed. Not only the force of law, but inherited systems of ideas concerning both social values and literary forms, and the economics of publishing have all worked, admittedly in varying degrees, as ‘limits’ on writers. Consequently, it is important not to regard literature and law as ‘polar opposites’, one a space of freedom and the other an institution of social control. Rather, this chapter will look more closely at the laws that regulate and control literature as a vital perspective in understanding the relationship between these two discourses.

More recently, Antony Julius has written generally of these laws that ‘bear on literary creativity’: