By Allan C. Hutchinson, Cambridge University Press, New York / Cambridge, 318 pages, $29.99

‘And I, my Lords, embody the law,” insists the “highly susceptible” Lord Chancellor in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe. In Laughing at the Gods Professor Allan C. Hutchinson of Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto, presents studies of eight jurists, seven men and one woman, who may not have embodied the law but who, the author maintains, helped materially to shape and develop it.