This is a book of love stories. It is a book that I never, ever expected to write. I have been writing about the workings of the law for well over forty years. Love is not something that I write about, certainly not in the way I do here. And yet this is a book about love, because there was no other way to tell this story.

Much to my surprise, the more I write about the law, the more I realize how incomplete the methods of the law are in and of themselves. Instead, this book argues for a deep connection between two subjects usually disconnected: our ability to love and our ability to resist injustice. I use methods of argument, and thus whole disciplines, that are usually sealed off from one another: normative political theory, psychology, history, and biography. But why love, and why love stories, in an argument by a law professor of all people? One of the abiding interests of my life is about the boundaries of our world – the restrictions that both shape our lives and constrict our lives – and the ways that we overcome those boundaries. It is now clear to me that nothing enables us to get across those boundaries like love. And an argument about love across the boundaries has required me to break interdisciplinary boundaries, not least the boundary between law and love, the topic of a wonderful poem, “Law Like Love,” by one of the artists at the center of this book, Wystan Auden. Auden's poem was written in the year he met – disastrously, as it turned out – the love of his life, Chester Kallman. Written to his lover, it is an urgent description of the law. He argues that law – both scientific and normative – is:

Auden's visceral experience of love led him to make connections not usually made, precisely because love – as he and the other lovers I study in this book came to experience it – enabled him to resist societal restrictions and embrace new creative possibilities.