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Slowing down a bit from the previous year, in which he directed six films, Raoul Walsh turned out only five pictures in 1918, the second of which was The Woman and the Law. Based on the then-notorious "Jack DeSaulies Case," the film is divided into two halves. In the first portion, the audience was shown how the good-girl heroine (played by Walsh's then-wife Miriam Cooper) is forced into a marriage of convenience. In the second portion, the heroine, now unhappily married, is driven to murder her husband (Ramsey Wallace) when he inaugurates an affair with a big-city temptress. The question: Will the "unwritten law," which states that a man has a right to kill anyone who tries to steal his wife, apply equally to a wronged woman? Cast as the seductress who comes between the husband and wife was Ziegfeld Follies beauty Peggy Hopkins Joyce.