Maatman on The Mockingbird's Brief: The Fairness Argument Stated In To Kill a Mockingbird @MaryEllenMaatma

Mary Ellen Maatman, Widener University Delaware Law School, is publishing The Mockingbird's Brief in volume 47 of the Cumberland Law Review (2017). Here is the abstract.

By comparing the texts of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman and To Kill a Mockingbird, this article explores what Harper Lee ultimately wanted to say in To Kill a Mockingbird, and why she said it the way that she did. The article’s thesis is that To Kill a Mockingbird can be understood as the “brief” written to make the case that Go Set a Watchman attempted to state: the massive resistance movement of the 1950’s was wrong. This article examines the rhetorical situation Harper Lee confronted as she wrote Go Set a Watchman and then transformed it into To Kill a Mockingbird. This situation is defined by considering Harper Lee and her upbringing, her audience in the Deep South, and the need to speak to that audience as the White Citizens’ Council movement took hold in the region. Go Set a Watchman was Lee’s first attempt to respond to the rhetorical situation posed by the Council movement’s purposes, methods, and rhetoric. In that work, Lee responded to this situation with a raw, morality-based counterargument to the Council movement. This argument had little chance of success, as segregationists at that time regarded themselves to be on the moral side of history. Thus, this article examines how To Kill a Mockingbird works as “the Mockingbird’s brief.” If published in the 1950’s, Go Set a Watchman’s morality argument might have had traction with Southern moderates, but was unlikely to persuade segregationists. Yet, legal developments in desegregation litigation indicated that segregationists were willing to at least pay lip service to fairness principles. Thus, Harper Lee used the reworking of Go Set a Watchman into To Kill a Mockingbird to seize the rhetorical situation with a fairness argument calculated to win over her audience. The shift to fairness, which at first blush might be perceived as ducking segregationists’ punches, actually was a shift to greater effectiveness for the time and place for which Lee wrote. This article concludes that Lee’s rhetorical strategy with To Kill a Mockingbird was effective. Ultimately, Harper Lee held a kind of reverse mirror up to segregationists by remaking her Atticus into a man who embodied what southern law and lawyers could be, if guided by fairness principles.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.