"LaCapra notes that in the trials of Flaubert and Baudelaire, while both the prosecution and the defense insisted on a view of the role of literature in society that was “conventionalizing, normalizing, and domesticating,” this was especially true of the defense. In each trial the defense of literature denied its experimental or transgressive character and insisted on its role in commemorating conventional values. Although Flaubert and Baudelaire put into practice immanent critique of the social and literary conditions of their time, this critique could find no voice in a court of law. This essay calls on us to remember the trials of these two great writers for what they reveal about the “variable historical manner in which literary’ experimentation . . . is bound up with broader political, legal, and sociocultural issues in the production, reception, and critical reading of texts.” With respect to the place of memory, LaCapra suggests that law, at least the law of crime, resists the transmission of particular understandings of literature, for example, of its transgressive, experimental value. Those seeking to use law to memorialize such understandings are regularly defeated. Unlike Felman, who sees law insatiating memory in uncanny ways, LaCaptra finds no such subversive potential in the trials of literature. He insists that law constrains memory and remembrance in a relatively predictable manner and points to the limits to which law as archive can be put."