This book argues that punitive and condemnatory reactions to illegal and dangerous sexual practices repress conflicting and troubling unconscious desires. Drawing from psychoanalysis, post-colonialism and feminism, Crime, Desire and Law's Unconscious examines ways in which the creation of danger and the infliction of harm through sexual behaviour are responded to in the criminal courts, in literature and in wider culture. It includes analysis of legal judgments in England, Australia, Canada and the United States, and literary texts by Shakespeare, the Marquis de Sade, J.G. Ballard and Susanna Moore.