Best Legal Fiction

John Mortimer lists his "five best" works of legal fiction, and The Oracle is glad that he included Charles Dickens' Bleak House. That novel, though not as good as David Copperfield or A Tale of Two Cities, is one of the best of Dickens' less noticed works (that is, those that tend not to be read by unappreciative high school students). Dickens' satire of the delays of a self-satisfied legal system and their impact on real people is as relevant to American jurisprudence today as it was to the Victorian Age.