The traces of literary-related court cases in parliamentary debates offer the potential to reconstruct the relationship between the literary, political and legal fields, providing insights into the (relative) autonomy of literature (sensu Bourdieu, Pierre. 2004. Der Staatsadel. Konstanz: UVK.). The DFG project A Country of Mediocre Literature at the University of Oldenburg investigates to which extent the development of (relative) autonomy of the Dutch literary field (Dorleijn and van Rees 2006; Grüttemeier and Laros. Law and Humanities 7:204–217, 2013) resonates in parliamentary debates. In the Netherlands, at least two literary trials led to extensive parliamentary debates, the trial of Henri Barbusse (1919) and the trial of Gerard Reve (1966). This article systematically analyzes the mentioning of all literary related court cases in the Dutch Parliament from 1900 until today, categorizing the results into phases of the acceptance of (relative) institutional autonomy on the one hand and describing the phenomenon of strategic referencing on the other.