Any reader of early modern drama is familiar with the scene of a woman on trial. Formally charged and tried, these notorious women get the chance to defend themselves, yet they face charges rather than bringing them. Women, as individuals and as a group, were also constantly 'arraigned' in print by such writers as the notorious Joseph Swetnam in his diatribe The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women (1615). As a consequence, defenders of women writing under female pseudonyms defended themselves and their sex by putting their attackers on trial in print, as in Esther Sowernam's pamphlet response to Swetnam, Esther Hath Hang'd Haman, in which 'she' proposes to arraign 'lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant men, and Husbands', or in the play Swetnam the Woman-hater, Arraigned by Women (1620). In addition, individual women turned to print to defend their own virtue against formal and informal charges. While the adversarial trial provided a useful structure for depicting and conducting the battle of the sexes, it offers a skewed if vivid image of women's relationship to law courts. My goal in this chapter is to sketch the range of women's engagements with the law in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and the various relationships between women's legal engagements and their writing. Women did not enter courtrooms only under duress as defendants. They regularly entered courtrooms of their own volition as plaintiffs or witnesses. Just as women attended the theatre, they also attended notorious trials as spectators. Insiders in some ways, they were included on different terms than men were.