A Criminal Power: James Baldwin and the LawJames Baldwin, one of the major African American writers of the twentieth century, has been the subject of a substantial body of literary criticism. As a prolific and experimental author with a marginal perspective a black man during segregation and the Civil Rights era, a homosexual at a time when tolerance toward gays was not common Baldwin has fascinated readers for over half a century. Yet Baldwin's critics have tended to separate his weighty,