The Merchant of Venice — William Shakespeare

A moneylender in your neighbourhood makes you sign an agreement: miss the repayment date and he can take a piece of your body as security. No court in India would enforce such a bond for a second. Yet the whole of Act IV of The Merchant of Venice is a courtroom watching Venice try to decide whether it must. Four hundred years later, law students still argue about whether that court got it right.

In two minutes

The trial scene in The Merchant of Venice stages a contract that should never have been enforceable, and then has it defeated not on that ground but on a technicality about blood — which is why the fairness of the ending troubles every law student who reads it closely.

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