[Posner is a lawyer and author of several books, including The Economics of Justice (1981) and The Problems of Jurisprudence (1990). In the following excerpt, he contends that The Just and the Unjust is not about the law, rather it is a story about the rite-of-passage of a young man.]

… I begin in low key with a work that after more than forty years seems on its way to being recognized as a minor classic—James Gould Cozzens's novel The Just and the Unjust, a work so pervasively and accurately "about" law that one might think the author an experienced lawyer (he had no legal training). Yet this is an illusion; the book is not about law in any interesting sense.

The setting is a small town in an unimportant rural county, circa 1940. The ostensible subject is a murder trial that begins at the start of the novel and concludes at the end. The protagonist is the county's assistant district attorney, Abner Coates—young, able, but rather priggish—who tries the case for the prosecution along with the district attorney. The D.A. is in charge but Coates takes an active role, making the opening statement to the jury and examining several important witnesses. The trial reveals that the defendants—repulsive hoods named Howell and Basso—had, along with a third man, Bailey, kidnapped a drug dealer named Zollicoffer. After the ransom was paid, Bailey decided it would be unsafe to return Zollicoffer alive. On the way to the spot where the kidnappers were to drop Zollicoffer off, Bailey shot him, and Howell and Basso helped Bailey weight Zollicoffer down with leg irons and dump him into a river. Bailey later died fleeing the police. Although Howell and Basso do not deny having taken an active part in the kidnapping, it never becomes clear whether they authorized, knew about in advance, or participated in the murder. As Coates, the D.A., and the judge all emphasize to the jury in urging a verdict of first-degree murder (which would mean the electric chair), the defendants' lack of participation in the actual murder affects their guilt not a whit. Provided they participated in the kidnapping, as unquestionably they did, they are guilty of first-degree murder because Zollicoffer was killed in the course of a felony in which they participated. However, to the disgust of Coates, the D.A., and the judge (who dresses down the jury afterward), the jury convicts Howell and Basso only of second-degree murder. The author leads us to understand, through one of the wise old codgers who people the novel, that the jury has exercised its prerogative of nullifying a law that it considers unjust—the felony-murder rule, a legal fiction that punishes a felon who is not a murderer as if he were one.

While the trial is wending its way to its surprising conclusion—for the reader is given no clue that the jury might fail to convict the defendants of first-degree murder—Coates is both getting engaged to be married and agreeing to run for D.A. (the incumbent is leaving for another job). It is understood that Coates cannot lose the election; he is a Republican, and Republicans always win in this county. But to agree to run he must overcome his aversion to the local Republican boss, who Coates fears will interfere in the D.A.'s office, though in fact the boss is pretty straight. The suspense in the novel is focused not on the trial, which seems a foregone conclusion but is not, but on whether Coates will overcome what are plainly priggish scruples to marrying his utterly charming childhood sweetheart and accepting the tremendous career opportunity opened up by the D.A.'s impending departure.

From this brief summary it should be plain that The Just and the Unjust is not really about trial strategy, the legal profession, the felony-murder rule, or the power of juries to acquit lawlessly, and thus that critics miss the point when they accuse Cozzens of "belligerent legalistic conservatism" [John P. McWilliams, Jr., "Innocent Crime or Criminal Innocence: The Trial in American Fiction," in Carl S. Smith, John P. McWilliams, Jr., and Max Bloomfield, Law and American Literature: A Collection of Essays, 1983]. This is a rite of passage novel, a Bildungsroman. The hero is a prissy kid at the beginning and a man at the end, having assumed family responsibilities and learned the difference between pure forms (of law, of career advancement) and sordid realities (law may diverge from the lay sense of justice, politics influences promotions), as well as the need to compromise, to moderate demands, to scale down ideals, to trim absolutes, to empathize—with the Republican boss, and above all with his sweetheart, to whose feelings Coates is remarkably insensitive at the beginning of the novel. The work has none of the resonance of Hamlet or the Iliad but is recognizably part of the same broad category of works, in which youthful idealism becomes tempered with realism through a series of crises.

That the law is rather a detail in all this, as revenge is rather a detail (though an essential one) in the other works, can be made clearer by a comparison with another and finer Cozzens novel, Guard of Honor, perhaps the best American novel about World War II. Set in Florida, it recounts a brief period in the administration of an air base by a young major general. He is champing at the bit to be sent overseas to do more fighting (he had held a major command in the North African campaign). But we soon understand that his command of the base, which involves dealing with domestic crises that have no martial dimension (race relations, a training accident), is an important preparation for the major combat command that he is slated to assume next—and that, with nice irony, is the command of fighter cover for the invasion of Japan, which of course never took place. Again it is a rite of passage novel, with the professional setting, in this case military, again incidental. The hero, at first insufficiently worldly-wise to handle senior administrative responsibilities, like Coates matures in the course of the novel by meeting the challenges of everyday life.

If either novel were about the professional challenges of its protagonists—if either one showed lawyers correcting their legal errors or generals correcting their military errors—they would not have much appeal, even to members of these professions. A novelist with neither legal nor military training is unlikely to have significant insights to impart at the level of actual practice, though [there are] some exceptions to this rule….