Literature can become the subject of legal proceedings for a variety of reasons, with obscenity, blasphemy, politics/public order, libel and privacy covering the majority of cases. This project will analyse this group of criminal and civil proceedings in Belgium and South Africa. From a literary studies perspective, the proceedings will be historically and systematically questioned as to the degree of institutional autonomy that jurisprudence accords to literary texts and which conceptions of the nature, characteristics and function of literature are represented and legitimised in jurisprudence. The guiding hypotheses are the result of preliminary work on Dutch jurisprudence's approach to literature, which points to a connection between the formation of a literary field (sensu Bourdieu) in the Netherlands at the end of the 19th century and the emergence of the concept of exceptio artis in Dutch jurisprudence in the first two decades of the 20th century. On the basis of variants of idealistic aesthetics and in line with the poetics dominant among contemporary connoisseurs, art and literature were given a special status that did not, however, offer a general guarantee of impunity. This constellation remains largely stable in its institutional and poetological dimension into the 21st century. The hypotheses put forward with reference to the Netherlands are to be examined and clarified in the present project on the basis of legal proceedings from the 19th to the 21st century against Dutch-language literature in Belgium and (closely related to Dutch) Afrikaans-language literature in South Africa. At the same time, the project aims to clarify the extent to which a systematic expansion of the comparative research perspective to include other countries and languages makes sense.