Rapping on Atticus Finch as Legal Hero After "Go Set a Watchman"

Jonathan Rapping, Atlanta's John Marshall Law School, is publishing It's a Sin to Kill a Mockingbird: The Need for Idealism in the Legal Profession in volume 114 of the Michigan Law Review (2016). Here is the abstract.

To Kill a Mockingbird's Atticus Finch has served as a role model and inspiration for law students and lawyers for over fifty years. When Go Set a Watchmen was published last year, Finch's status as legal hero was threatened. In this essay I argue that Finch is a uniquely important role model to lawyers committed to social justice and that he has the ability to inspire attorneys seeking to live lives of purpose. We desperately need this inspiration in our profession. I conclude that in a profession that has lost its way we should continue to view Finch in this light and resist the temptation to destroy this fictional hero.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Federal Judges Read Poetry at Poets House

The University Bookman reports on an October 20, 2015 event which the Federal Bar Council set up at Poets House in which four U. S. federal judges read poetry. The participants were District Judges Colleen McMahon and District Court Judge William F. Kuntz, and Circuit Court Judges Gerald E. Lynch and Dennis Jacobs.

Lawyer/poet Eugene Schlanger provides an extensive review of the event here.

Tip of the beret to Allen Mendenhall@allenmendenhall

To All the Lawyer Poets (and Other Poets Out There)-- Call For Papers: American Poetry Imagines the Law

Via James R. Martel:

CFP for panel: American Poetry Imagines the Law Shelley’s pronouncement in his Defense of Poetry that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” has been cited frequently as an argument for the study of law and literature – either as the study of law’s uses of literary language (law asliterature) or of literature’s engagement of legal issues (law in literature). Studies of law in literature have predominantly focused on prose fiction and, more rarely, on drama. By comparison, poetry’s imaginations of the law have hardly been discussed, and indeed, Richard Posner summarily dismissed poetry as a field of inquiry when he claimed that “[r]elatively few short poems take law as their theme.” Yet when Shelley wrote of “poets,” he had in mind writers of verse.

Taking Shelley as our point of departure for this panel, we explore how American poetry imagines the law in two kinds of poems. We are interested, on the one hand, in poems that engage with and reflect on legal concepts and categories such as justice, punishment, property, or rights and, on the other hand, in poems that address historically specific issues and events, such as legal reform, spectacular trials, or institutions of the law from the law school student to the Supreme Court. The central question that we address in close readings concerns the relationship of the poems’ formal characteristics to the “legislating” power that Shelley attributes to them: Which specific formal strategies do poems employ to imagine and negotiate legal categories, processes and institutions? Which poetic traditions and modes do they engage? And, most importantly, what are the affordances of the poem in imagining the law that cannot be found in prose fiction, drama, or the essay? In particular we are interested in how specific poetic modes (such as satire, didacticism, pastoralism, or sentimentalism) and subgenres (haikus, sonnets, ballads, narrative poems, etc.) have been used to deal with the law.

We invite close readings of poems from the colonial to the contemporary period; authors may include but are not limited to Sherman Alexie, Maya Angelou, John Ashbury, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Cullen Bryant, Averill Curdy, Phoebe Cary, Emily Dickinson, Rita Dove, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Robert Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Marge Piercy, Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Simic, Claudia Rankine, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Richard Wright.

Please send your abstract (300 words) and a short CV to Birte Christ and Stefanie Mueller: Birte.Christ@anglistik.uni-giessen.de; s.mueller@uni-frankfurt.de

Justice in the Waverley Novels: The Heart of Mid-Lothian

Enrique García Díaz has published An Overview of Justice in Sir Walter Scott Waverley Novels: The Heart of Mid-Lothian in the Oñati Socio-Legal Series, Vol. 4, No. 6, 2014. Here is the abstract. 

English Abstract: Although Sir Walter Scott is a well-known writer most of his readers know that he became an advocate in 1792, when he was admitted to the bar. Since then Scott and other advocates walked the floor at Parliament House (home of the Faculty of Advocates and the Court of Session) waiting to be hired. Scott’s own experiences as a fledgling advocate are echoed in those of Alain Fairford in his novel Redgauntlet (Scott 1824), which provides a vivid picture of Parliament House in the eighteenth century. During his life, Scott combined extensive writing and editing issues with his daily work as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire. Walter Scott was not unaware of Justice and Law and The Heart of Mid-Lothian is the novel in which he introduces to the reader the Scottish Legal System during the eighteenth century. However, there are few more examples that I will explain.
Spanish Abstract: Aunque Sir Walter Scott es un conocido escritor, la mayoría de sus lectores saben que en 1792 se hizo abogado, cuando fue admitido en el colegio de abogados. Desde entonces Scott y otros abogados rondaron el Parlamento con la esperanza de ser contratados. Las propias experiencias de Scott como un abogado novel se reflejan en las de Alain Fairford en su novela Redgauntlet (Scott 1824), lo que ofrece una vívida imagen del Parlamento (sede de la facultad de Derecho y Tribunal Supremo) en el siglo XVIII. Durante su vida, Scott compaginó una profusa actividad como escritor y editor con su trabajo diario como juez en Selkirk. Walter Scott conocía la justicia y el derecho y El corazón de Mid-Lothian es la novela en la presenta al lector el régimen jurídico de Escocia durante el siglo XVIII. Sin embargo, se explicarán algunos otros ejemplos.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Eighteenth Century Lawyers On Stage

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has published William Blackstone: Courtroom Dramatist? in Re-Interpreting Blackstone's Commentaries: A Seminal Text in National and International Contexts (Wilfrid Prest, ed.; Oxford, Hart, 2014). Here is the abstract.

This book chapter discusses William Blackstone's role as a judge, in relation to accounts (such as Bentham's) that portrayed him as "formal, precise, and affected." Rather than evaluating legal performance, in the courtroom, by reference to binaries such as formal/informal, cautious/inquisitive, or stolid/creative, I argue that the success of a legal performance depends on the speaker (e.g., witness, lawyer, judge), the audience (e.g., jury, judge, public), and the subject (e.g., the prosecution’s motives, the defendant’s alibi, the majesty of the common law). To explore this idea, I look at eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century commentators who praised or criticized particular lawyers or judges (in the course of offering "strictures on the bar") by invoking the language of theatricality. As I show, this language was most prevalent in discussions of jury trials, and was often pointedly abandoned in discussions of purely legal arguments (e.g., arguments before appellate courts). The figures in question include William Garrow, Sir John Scott, Sir Francis Buller, and Richard Sheridan. I also consider portrayals of inarticulate lawyers on the eighteenth-century stage, arguing that for the most part, these portrayals make none of the distinctions suggested here, as to audience and subject, but instead simply treat this character as a figure of fun because he is incompetent to perform his task, whatever that task may be. I close by reconsidering a shorthand transcription of Blackstone's performance on the bench in the 1770 trial of Onslow v. Horne, arguing that his conduct comports with an emerging sense of what makes for a good legal argument -- namely, one that takes written explanation as the template for an effective style of oral presentation, and one that Blackstone's own Commentaries helped to promote.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.