CFP: John Grisham and the Law: The University of Memphis Law Review @uofmemphis

From the Mailbox: Via Andrew J. McClurg, University of Memphis School of Law:

CALL FOR PAPERS:  JOHN GRISHAM AND THE LAW

Rudy Baylor, a Memphis Law graduate, lost his new associate job before it even started when a bigger firm bought the firm that had hired him as a 3L.  Defeated, yet still determined to pursue a career in the law, Baylor accepted an associate job at an ambulance-chaser firm.  Little did young Baylor know that he would soon find himself litigating against a white-shoe law firm representing a health insurance monolith in an insurance claim—his very first case—that wound up being worth $50 million.

Of course, none of this actually happened in real life.  Twenty years ago, this tale unfolded on the silver screen in the 1997 major motion picture The Rainmaker, which brought to life author John Grisham’s novel of the same name.

We hope you will join us in celebrating John Grisham’s contributions to the law by submitting your articles on legal topics that arise in Grisham’s stories to The University of Memphis Law Review.  An ideal submission will frame its content with specific reference(s) to Grisham’s work(s) and will offer a practical legal argument.  We aim to publish accepted manuscripts in Volume 48, Number 3 of The University of Memphis Law Review.

John Grisham has repeatedly found ways to use his novels to offer incisive commentary on our profession and has popularized timeless themes of law and justice for the masses, in the South and elsewhere.  Topics could include, but are not limited to:

The Runaway Jury

·         Voir dire / jury tampering

·         Settlements and arbitration

·         Collateral estoppel

The Chamber

·         Death penalty and politics

·         Working with hostile clients

·         Ethical considerations when representing members of the same family

A Time to Kill

·         Race and the law

·         Law in the South

·         Vigilante justice

·         Hate crimes

·         Advocacy techniques

·         Right to a fair trial (venue, voir dire)

·         Capital punishment

The Client

·         Fifth Amendment issues

·         Witness-protection program

·         Attorney-client privilege

The Firm

·         Mail fraud

·         Moral obligations when you know your client is guilty

·         Moral and professional conflicts arising for junior associates

·         Balancing the obligation to maintain clients’ confidentiality with the obligation to comply with law enforcement’s demands

The Rainmaker

·         Attorney-client relationships

·         Self-defense justifications

·         Refusal to pay insurance claims

·         Punitive damages

·         Tort reform

Submission Protocol

To submit an entry to this themed book, please submit directly to Maggie McGowan, Senior Articles Editor at memphislawarticles@gmail.com with “Grisham Book” in the subject line.

A New Book on Lawyers in Fiction

New from Palgrave Macmillan: Lars Ole Sauerberg, The Legal Thriller From Gardner To Grisham: See You In Court! (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Here's a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

This book offers a critically informed yet relaxed historical overview of the legal thriller, a unique contribution to crime fiction where most of the titles have been written by professionals such as lawyers and judges. The legal thriller typically uses court trials as the suspense-creating background for presenting legal issues reflecting a wide range of concerns, from corporate conflicts to private concerns, all in a dramatic but highly informed manner. With authors primarily from the USA and the UK, the genre is one which nonetheless enjoys a global reading audience. As well as providing a survey of the legal thriller, this book takes a gender–focused approach to analyzing recently published titles within the field. It also argues for the fascination of the legal thriller both in the way its narrative pattern parallels that of an actual court trial, and by the way it reflects, frequently quite critically, the concerns of contemporary society.

Looks like a very interesting publication, but the price! Ouch. Sixty-seven euros for the e-book, nearly 100 Euros for the hardcover.

Loathsome Lawyers From Literature: A List From Attorney/Author Alex Wade @SurfNation1

Alex Wade's list of unpalatable literary lawyers: from Dr. Gonzo (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) to Don Sebastiano (The Day of Judgment).

Alex Wade is a writer who also practices media law (Carter-Ruck). His latest book is Flack's Last Shift (Blue Mark Books, 2016).

A "Top Ten List" of Fictional Lawyers From @OllyJarviso

Olly Jarvis offers a list of his ten favorite fictional lawyers here. Do any on the list surprise you? I have to say that the choice of Edward G. Robinson's Victor Scott (Illegal) and Matthew Shardlake (C.D. Ransom's character from a sequence of popular novels) were choices I didn't expect.

Mr. Jarvis is the author of  two legal thrillers, Cut-Throat Defense (2016) and Death By Dangerous (2015). He practices criminal law in Manchester, England.

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.

Empathy, Masculinity, and Atticus Finch

Richard H. McAdams, University of Chicago Law School, has published Empathy and Masculinity in Harper Lee's to Kill a Mockingbird in American Guy: Masculinity in American Law and Literature 239-261 (Saul Levmore and Martha C. Nussbaum, Oxford University Press, 2014). Here is the abstract.

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird illustrates a troubled relationship between lawyering and empathy and between empathy and masculinity. To begin, empathetic understanding has two sides: it can produce compassionate or altruistic behavior, but there is also a strategic value: a competitor who understands the thoughts and feelings of others is better able to anticipate an opponent's next move and stay one step ahead. Atticus Finch demonstrates both aspects of empathy: his ability to imagine the world from the perspective of others makes him a more compassionate and helpful father and neighbor, but also a more effective lawyer, better able to cross-examine adverse witnesses and to make arguments that (might) appeal to jurors. Atticus understands better than anyone else in Maycomb the tragic predicament of Mayella Ewell, but he uses his empathy to harm her, that is, to help his client Tom Robinson by exposing her as a liar. The irony is that the empathetic insight that makes Atticus the best person to cross-examine Mayella also makes him (among all those who believe she is lying) feel the most compassion for her. But the role of zealous advocate leaves limited room for showing compassion to one's adversary. Empathy connects with the novel’s focus on masculinity. The novel offers a new version of white manhood in the Jim Crow South. The conventional white southern male of the 1930s romanticized the Lost Cause of the Confederacy and adhered to a strict code of chivalry that required the use of violence to assuage insults to honor, particularly the honor of white southern women. According to this chivalric ideology, the greatest threat to white womanhood was black male predation, and the manly response was the lynching, not only of alleged black rapists but of other black men whose behavior seemed to question white supremacy. The novel offers Atticus as a male hero who rejects the white supremacist assumptions of lynching. Less obvious are the tools the novel uses to draw our attention to the concept of manhood and to invert its standard meaning. Atticus' courage is nonviolent, which the novel contrasts with cowardly violence; Atticus fights for a lost cause that is not the Confederacy, but its victim; and Atticus acts valiantly by protecting an innocent black man from the accusation of a white woman. Southern chivalry is turned on its head. The connection to empathy is that Atticus' sense of empathy is one of the key ways in which he systematically violates period expectations for masculinity.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

A New Thriller From Kermit Roosevelt

Kermit Roosevelt, Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, is publishing his second novel, Allegiance  (ReganArts). Here is a description from the publisher's website.

When the news broke about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Caswell “Cash” Harrison was all set to drop out of law school and join the army… until he flunked the physical. Instead, he’s given the opportunity to serve as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. He and another clerk stumble onto a potentially huge conspiracy aimed at guiding the court’s interests, and the cases dealing with the constitutionality of the prison camps created to detain Japanese-Americans seem to play a key part. Then Cash’s colleague dies under mysterious circumstances, and the young, idealistic lawyer is determined to get at the truth. His investigation will take him from the office of J. Edgar Hoover to an internment camp in California, where he directly confronts the consequences of America’s wartime policies. Kermit Roosevelt combines the momentum of a top-notch legal thriller with a thoughtful examination of one of the worst civil rights violations in US history in this long-awaited follow-up to In the Shadow of the Law.

The book will be released August 25, 2015.

A Lawyer In Natchez

Bill Sheehan of the Washington Post reviews Greg Iles' new novel The Bone Tree here. The book, the second in a trilogy about lawyer/novelist Penn Cage, explores violent events linked to Mississippi's  past.

Mr. Iles' novel Natchez Burning, the first novel in the trilogy, is slated for TV; more here from Deadline.com.

And the Winners Are...

The ABA Journal, August issue has the annual pop culture feature: this year is devoted to "the 25 Greatest Law Novels." The panel chose, in order, the following novels as numbers 1 through 25:

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
Herman Melville, Billy Budd
Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities
Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy
John Jay Osborn, The Paper Chase
Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener
Richard Wright, Native Son
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
John Grisham, A Time To Kill
Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Leon Uris, QB VII
John Grisham, The Firm
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Robert Traver, Anatomy of a Murder
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Oxbow Incident
Jane Gardam, Old Filth


The August issue isn't available online yet, but should be posted soon here.

This list does seem to be heavily U.S.-centric. Which legal novels would be on your "Best 25" list? Some or all of the above? What novels by non-U.S. authors would you choose?

Update: Check out the list here online.