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In transforming the legal disputes over a 17th-century Roman murder case into poetry in The Ring and the Book, Browning brings law into literature. The two lawyers' monologues in the poem expose and criticize the politics of nothingness in a legal fiction. Just as Bentham condemns fictions in legal language, in the two lawyers' legal narrative Browning makes a critique of the way fictions are presented as real entities and the way these fictions exercise a coercive power on human thoughts and actions. Browning shows that the legal fiction is created and maintained through aesthetic language. He also exposes various narrative strategies that legal aestheticism adopts in order to conceal its empty referents.