The courtroom scene holds a natural fascination for writers of fiction. The obvious reason is that fictional characters are often getting divorced and committing murders, all the while suffering from a chronic case of bad luck — just the sort one would expect to be regularly hauled before a judge. But the underlying reason is that authors are in the same line of work as jurors. The task of both begins with calling someone to account for his or her deeds.

That insight animates the new anthology, “Law Lit: From Atticus Finch to ‘The Practice’: A Collection of Great Writing About the Law” (New Press, 320 pages, $26.95), edited by Thane Rosenbaum, a law professor at Fordham University and a contributor to The New York Sun, which showcases a wide range of crime and courtroom fiction.

Song lyrics from Johnny Cash are found a few pages away from the short stories of Maupassant or O. Henry. There is particularly good representation of Southern authors, although European writers also get their share.

Of course, lawyers are the most natural audience for the book, and the anthology includes a nice sampling of some of the most colorful practitioners in the canon. There is John Barth’s fictional member of the Maryland bar, Todd Andrews, who says: “winning or losing litigation is of no concern to me, and I think I’ve never made a secret of that fact to my clients.” But “Law Lit” isn’t preoccupied with answering the snide remark from Carl Sandburg, who pleaded, “tell me why a hearse horse snickers hauling a lawyer’s bones.”

Instead, the excerpts here are less a record of fiction’s great lawyers than of fiction’s great defendants. And the tragic experience of this class of protagonists, for whom the law isn’t a system of justice but a mocking and unfulfilled ideal, isn’t likely to reassure attorneys about their career choice. Here are Joseph K. and Billy Budd and Tom Robinson in all their innocence. The defendants found in novels may be more likeable and generally more innocent than those currently being arraigned at 100 Centre St. or 500 Pearl St. But they are just as likely to get convicted.

In this brand of fiction, the district attorneys seem to only prosecute cases against the wishes of readers, who are typically allied with a sympathetic defendant. The best orations from defense lawyers always manage to convince us, the readers, but never the juries.

That isn’t because authors have a dim view of the law. It is because their interests aren’t the same as those of lawyers. Lawyers presumably want justice to be served. Authors have little compunction about what happens to their protagonists. They like to stick their unfortunate characters in pressure cookers, and a courtroom serves that purpose well. A story that ends with justice served might just be too neat for those who traffic in the messiness of human endeavor.

Remember what happens to Meursault, the unreflective protagonist of Camus’s “The Stranger.” Only a capital trial on charges of killing a man hardly known to him is capable of jolting Meursault into taking stock of himself. And still, the legal system is depicted not as penetrating but as trifling: The prosecution focuses on seemingly irrelevant evidence about how Meursault hadn’t cried upon learning of his mother’s death. “It was then I felt a stirring go through the room and for the first time I realized that I was guilty,” he thinks.

Fiction is organized around such moments of self-discovery, which the law, in its ideal of objectivity, means to stifle. Readers should be thankful that “Law Lit” contains its fair share of such moments.

jgoldstein@nysun.com