This well-illustrated book explores the relationship between art and law by analysing a number of the more interesting trials involving art. This is done through a selection of newly commissioned essays by art historians, lawyers and cultural theorists. The book deserves attention by the readers of this Journal because a substantial number of the trials discussed involve the relationship between law and religion, and the boundaries of censorship, whether on the grounds of blasphemy, obscenity or (in the case of Re St Stephen Walbrook and the Venetian Inquisition's process against Paolo Veronese's painting of the Last Supper, subsequently re-named Feast in the House of Levi) doctrinal grounds.

A number of the essays touch on the provocative work by Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, the subject of legal action in both the USA (where issues of federal funding arose) and Australia (where a claim of obscenity was defeated because the work had artistic merit, and a claim of blasphemous libel failed). The work is the subject of an essay by Anthony Julius, which analyses it as the epitome of a ‘transgressive work’ and explores the classic defences used to justify the creation of such works – art is special (the aesthetic defence or ‘alibi’) and freedom of speech – but also other defences: that works of art should be challenging and shock us to grasp some new truth about art, the world or ourselves (the estrangement defence); that disturbing new art works are successors to familiar, established works and should be judged by reference to them (the canonic defence); and that art exists in its own sphere and is not to be confused with polemic or propaganda (the formalist defence).

Of course, the vast majority of art is not transgressive and an aesthetic based on ‘the shock of the new’ should be questioned, but art's continuing power to shock religious and other sensibilities and to create legal issues, from sixteenth-century Venice and the Inquisition to twenty-first century Russia and the Orthodox Church (Russian Federation v Samodurov and Vasilovskaya), is a fascinating area for legal and cultural analysis, which this book ably provides.