My research focuses on the long and often unidentified literary history of legal cases in the literature of the long eighteenth century. The law is often directly represented in the fiction of the eighteenth century; criminal proceedings, warrants, contested legal documents, and even trials are well-known tropes in eighteenth-century fiction; however, my research focuses not on representations of the law in literature, but rather, on the influence that actual legal cases had on literature.  My interest in this intersection between law and literature grew out of my discovery of several British works written throughout the long eighteenth century that were inspired by the French Girard-Cadière trial. These works include both the sort of pamphlets which would accompany any interesting legal case, and a range of literary texts including poetry, plays, and novels by canonical authors. These literary texts use the trial to engage rhetorically with a number of issues, including the inability of the legal system to protect its citizens, the patriarchal responsibilities of the church, anti-Catholic sentiment, and female education. Such works are representative of the ways in which authors used the law and contemporary legal cases as rhetorical tools for engaging with diverse political and social issues. My research thus aims to be partly one of recovery, looking at understudied texts that engage with contemporary legal coverage. My work seeks to bring together canonical texts (such as Henry Fielding’s Amelia [1749], Frances Burney’s Evelina [1778], and Matthew Lewis’ The Monk [1796]) with lesser-known plays, essays, pamphlets, periodicals, poems, and other archival sources.