For many, the American road trip is a pursuit of the sublime — a sequence of national parks, vast horizons, and neon-lit diners. But for James Lasdun, the destination was the courthouse. Last autumn, the British-born writer spent a month traversing the United States with a singular itinerary: attending as many criminal and civil hearings as the calendar allowed. The resulting essay, published in the London Review of Books under the title "Reality Instruction," reframes the great American journey not as an encounter with landscape but as an encounter with institutional power.
The premise is deceptively simple. Rather than seeking the country's beauty, Lasdun sought its friction — the places where citizens and the state meet under formal rules of procedure, where language is constrained by statute and precedent, and where outcomes carry consequences that no road trip normally touches. By moving through various jurisdictions, he observed the granular mechanics of the law, where abstract principles meet the messy, often tragic specifics of individual lives.
The Courthouse as American Theater
The courtroom has long occupied a central place in the American literary and cultural imagination. From the trial scenes in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird to the procedural architecture of television dramas, the legal hearing functions as a stage on which the country's deepest tensions — race, class, property, violence — are performed under oath. What distinguishes Lasdun's project is the deliberate stripping away of narrative polish. There is no single case to follow, no protagonist whose fate organizes the story. Instead, the accumulation of hearings across different states produces something closer to a composite portrait, a kind of civic pointillism.
This approach has literary precedent. Writers from Alexis de Tocqueville onward have treated American institutions as texts to be read for what they reveal about national character. Tocqueville himself devoted substantial attention to the judiciary in Democracy in America, arguing that the legal system was among the most distinctive features of the republic. Lasdun's contribution updates that tradition by grounding it in physical movement — the road trip as research method, the courthouse as field site.
The choice to attend proceedings as a spectator rather than a journalist or legal scholar also matters. Courtrooms in the United States are, with limited exceptions, open to the public. This transparency is a constitutional feature, rooted in the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of a public trial. Yet few citizens exercise the right to simply sit and watch. Lasdun's month-long attendance thus doubles as a quiet argument about civic attention — about what becomes visible when someone chooses to look at what is technically available to everyone.
Law as Landscape
By substituting courthouses for national parks, Lasdun's project implicitly raises a question about what constitutes the "real" America. The road trip genre, from Jack Kerouac to contemporary travel writing, has traditionally privileged geography and encounter — the open road as metaphor for freedom, possibility, or decline. Lasdun inverts the metaphor. The rooms he enters are enclosed, procedural, governed by rigid protocols. Freedom, in these spaces, is precisely what is at stake rather than what is assumed.
Each hearing, in this framing, serves as a localized microcosm: a window into how different regions interpret and enforce the social contract. The variation matters. American law is not monolithic; it is layered across federal, state, and municipal jurisdictions, each with its own statutes, sentencing norms, and courtroom cultures. A month of travel through this system reveals not unity but a patchwork — coherent in its constitutional foundations, divergent in its local applications.
The essay's underlying tension is between the orderliness of legal procedure and the disorder of the lives that pass through it. Courts exist to impose structure on conflict, to translate human suffering and transgression into categories that can be adjudicated. Whether that translation clarifies or distorts is a question Lasdun's project leaves open, and perhaps that is its sharpest contribution. The courtroom promises resolution — a verdict, a sentence, a settlement — but the observer in the gallery sees something less conclusive: a system straining to hold, case by case, against the weight of what it is asked to contain.
Whether the American courthouse reveals the country's strength or its fractures may depend on which hearing one happens to attend, and on what one is prepared to see.
With reporting from London Review of Books.
Source · London Review of Books
