Professor Len Neihoff’s latest book, ‘Meeting Shakespeare at the Bar,’ grew out of a popular seminar he teaches at Michigan Law.
By Bob Needham
Michigan Law
Reading the works of Shakespeare can enrich the study of the law—and reading the law can do the same for the Bard’s plays, as Professor Len Niehoff, ‘84, illustrates in a new book.
Meeting Shakespeare at the Bar: Reading the Bard Through the Lens of the Law (American Bar Association, 2026) grew out of a popular seminar Niehoff teaches on Shakespeare and the Law, in which the class reads and discusses a play each week.
The book has roots in the conversations from those classes, and it also feels like a conversation—Niehoff refers to the Bard as “Will” throughout.
The book is written for a general audience; it requires no special knowledge of either Shakespeare or the law.
Each chapter covers a particular play, providing the necessary background for the reader to follow the discussion, even if the play is unfamiliar to them.
Niehoff recently answered five questions about the book:
—————
1. You talk about how becoming comfortable with uncertainty is an important skill in both Shakespeare and the law. How so?
Many of our undergraduates come from disciplines where there are correct answers to the questions they confront. Then they come to law school and we spend so much time talking about cases where the answers are ambiguous and where we dedicate substantial amounts of class time to arguing both sides of a question and becoming comfortable with that ambiguity.
In my view, Shakespeare’s plays are much more about asking questions than they are about answering them. For example, Measure for Measure ends on a notoriously ambiguous note. There’s an overture toward marriage, and we absolutely don’t know whether the woman accepts it or not. Shakespeare’s plays offer a wonderful training ground for getting used to uncertainty.
—————
2. What are some themes that are common to the law and Shakespeare’s plays?
The law is concerned with intention and responsibility. Shakespeare’s fascinated with that problem. The law is interested in questions of conscience. Shakespeare’s deeply interested in those questions. The law is very involved in problems of social class and oppression and discrimination, and so is Shakespeare.
The last play we read together is Coriolanus, which is very much about role morality. The ethics rules that govern lawyers are entirely about role morality.
The line from the things that interest Shakespeare to the things that interest lawyers and legal scholars is a very short line and a very straight one.
—————
3. What’s your favorite Shakespeare play to watch, and what’s your favorite one to teach?
My favorite Shakespeare play to watch is Macbeth. I just think it’s a magnificent play. It’s relatively short. It holds your attention. It has some weird structural problems that directors have to solve, but we’ve gotten good at navigating them and at leaving some parts out that are unnecessary. Its poetry is dazzlingly good and memorable. Its lessons are timeless.
My favorite one to teach, I think, is Hamlet. You could have a Shakespeare and the Law course where you only taught Hamlet, because you can take it in so many different directions. With most of the plays that I teach, there are two or three, maybe four, connections between the play and law. But in Hamlet, there are just so many connections. It is the play with the most to mine in a teaching environment.
—————
4. What sort of feedback do you get from the students?
I’m always interested in how much the students love King Lear. I think they really like it for two reasons. One of the central issues of the play is legitimacy, which relates to the degree to which the law and society determine who counts and who doesn’t as a human being. We see how legitimacy plays out in our own time with issues around immigration and race and gender and so forth.
On a more personal level, Lear is also about a difficult family, and it’s about an aging relative and all the ways in which they can be unreasonable. I always have some people in the room who are dealing with the challenges of an older relative who they love, but who is difficult. I think my students experience Lear for the grand tragedy that it is, but also take it very personally.
—————
5. After all the studying and discussing and teaching you’ve done on this subject, what can you conclude about Shakespeare’s attitude toward the law of his time?
We have to be careful in attributing views to Shakespeare, because we know so little about him. We don’t have diaries; we don’t have correspondence. One of the things we try to avoid in the class is saying, “Here’s what Shakespeare thought about X.”
Having said that, I think the plays generally reflect a pretty strong skepticism about law, and all the players within the legal system, for all sorts of reasons. Some of that is for comedic effect; some of it is for dramatic effect; some of it is to drive the plot.
So, if you were looking for a strong, celebratory reaffirmation of the glories of the legal system, you’d really struggle to find it in the works of Shakespeare. I think it’s fair to say that he wanted to invite us to think more deeply about that system—not to simply take these institutions as intrinsically valuable, but to ask hard questions about them and to always look at them with a skeptical eye.
I think that’s what a good legal education asks its students to do as well. As I remind my students in all my courses, if the law needs fixing, it will fall to them to fix it.
Michigan Law
Reading the works of Shakespeare can enrich the study of the law—and reading the law can do the same for the Bard’s plays, as Professor Len Niehoff, ‘84, illustrates in a new book.
Meeting Shakespeare at the Bar: Reading the Bard Through the Lens of the Law (American Bar Association, 2026) grew out of a popular seminar Niehoff teaches on Shakespeare and the Law, in which the class reads and discusses a play each week.
The book has roots in the conversations from those classes, and it also feels like a conversation—Niehoff refers to the Bard as “Will” throughout.
The book is written for a general audience; it requires no special knowledge of either Shakespeare or the law.
Each chapter covers a particular play, providing the necessary background for the reader to follow the discussion, even if the play is unfamiliar to them.
Niehoff recently answered five questions about the book:
—————
1. You talk about how becoming comfortable with uncertainty is an important skill in both Shakespeare and the law. How so?
Many of our undergraduates come from disciplines where there are correct answers to the questions they confront. Then they come to law school and we spend so much time talking about cases where the answers are ambiguous and where we dedicate substantial amounts of class time to arguing both sides of a question and becoming comfortable with that ambiguity.
In my view, Shakespeare’s plays are much more about asking questions than they are about answering them. For example, Measure for Measure ends on a notoriously ambiguous note. There’s an overture toward marriage, and we absolutely don’t know whether the woman accepts it or not. Shakespeare’s plays offer a wonderful training ground for getting used to uncertainty.
—————
2. What are some themes that are common to the law and Shakespeare’s plays?
The law is concerned with intention and responsibility. Shakespeare’s fascinated with that problem. The law is interested in questions of conscience. Shakespeare’s deeply interested in those questions. The law is very involved in problems of social class and oppression and discrimination, and so is Shakespeare.
The last play we read together is Coriolanus, which is very much about role morality. The ethics rules that govern lawyers are entirely about role morality.
The line from the things that interest Shakespeare to the things that interest lawyers and legal scholars is a very short line and a very straight one.
—————
3. What’s your favorite Shakespeare play to watch, and what’s your favorite one to teach?
My favorite Shakespeare play to watch is Macbeth. I just think it’s a magnificent play. It’s relatively short. It holds your attention. It has some weird structural problems that directors have to solve, but we’ve gotten good at navigating them and at leaving some parts out that are unnecessary. Its poetry is dazzlingly good and memorable. Its lessons are timeless.
My favorite one to teach, I think, is Hamlet. You could have a Shakespeare and the Law course where you only taught Hamlet, because you can take it in so many different directions. With most of the plays that I teach, there are two or three, maybe four, connections between the play and law. But in Hamlet, there are just so many connections. It is the play with the most to mine in a teaching environment.
—————
4. What sort of feedback do you get from the students?
I’m always interested in how much the students love King Lear. I think they really like it for two reasons. One of the central issues of the play is legitimacy, which relates to the degree to which the law and society determine who counts and who doesn’t as a human being. We see how legitimacy plays out in our own time with issues around immigration and race and gender and so forth.
On a more personal level, Lear is also about a difficult family, and it’s about an aging relative and all the ways in which they can be unreasonable. I always have some people in the room who are dealing with the challenges of an older relative who they love, but who is difficult. I think my students experience Lear for the grand tragedy that it is, but also take it very personally.
—————
5. After all the studying and discussing and teaching you’ve done on this subject, what can you conclude about Shakespeare’s attitude toward the law of his time?
We have to be careful in attributing views to Shakespeare, because we know so little about him. We don’t have diaries; we don’t have correspondence. One of the things we try to avoid in the class is saying, “Here’s what Shakespeare thought about X.”
Having said that, I think the plays generally reflect a pretty strong skepticism about law, and all the players within the legal system, for all sorts of reasons. Some of that is for comedic effect; some of it is for dramatic effect; some of it is to drive the plot.
So, if you were looking for a strong, celebratory reaffirmation of the glories of the legal system, you’d really struggle to find it in the works of Shakespeare. I think it’s fair to say that he wanted to invite us to think more deeply about that system—not to simply take these institutions as intrinsically valuable, but to ask hard questions about them and to always look at them with a skeptical eye.
I think that’s what a good legal education asks its students to do as well. As I remind my students in all my courses, if the law needs fixing, it will fall to them to fix it.
Michigan Law professor Len Niehoff, with a statue of Shakespeare in New York’s Central Park, thinks the Bard’s plays generally reflect a strong skepticism about law.
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