This book is the first monograph to critically evaluate the work of the literary scholar René Girard from the perspectives of Law and Literature and Law and Film Studies, two of the most multidisciplinary branches of critical legal theory. The central thesis is that Girard’s theory of the scapegoat mechanism provides a wholly new and original means of re-conceptualizing the nature of judicial modernity, which is the belief that modern Law constitutes an internally coherent and exclusively secular form of rationality.