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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Law
To Kill A Mockingbird And Legal Ethics: On The Role Of Atticus Finch’S Attic Rhetoric In Fulfillment Of Duties To Client, To Court, To Society, And To Self, Michelle M. Kundmueller
To Kill A Mockingbird And Legal Ethics: On The Role Of Atticus Finch’S Attic Rhetoric In Fulfillment Of Duties To Client, To Court, To Society, And To Self, Michelle M. Kundmueller
Political Science & Geography Faculty Publications
Atticus Finch, protagonist of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and longtime hero of the American bar, is well known, but he is not well understood. This article unlocks the secret to his status as the most admired of fictional attorneys by demonstrating the role that his rhetoric plays in his exemplary fulfillment of the duties of an attorney to zealously represent clients, to serve as an officer of the court, and to act as a public citizen with a special responsibility for the quality of justice. Always using the simplest accurate wording, focusing on reason over emotion, and speaking …
Response To Commentaries On Who’S The Bigot?, Linda C. Mcclain
Response To Commentaries On Who’S The Bigot?, Linda C. Mcclain
Faculty Scholarship
One of the joys of writing a book is the chance to have its arguments and observations evaluated by creative and engaged readers. I am very grateful that the scholars included in this book symposium provided such constructive commentary on the manuscript of my book, Who’s the Bigot? Learning from Conflicts over Marriage and Civil Rights Law. One of those commentators, Professor Imer Flores, also generously hosted a wonderful live conference at which I had the chance to hear and engage with early versions of several of these commentaries. The final book, I hope, reflects improvements that grew out of …
Writer Re-Written: What Really (Might Have) Happened To Atticus And Scout, Rob Atkinson
Writer Re-Written: What Really (Might Have) Happened To Atticus And Scout, Rob Atkinson
Scholarly Publications
No abstract provided.
Children Once, Not Forever: Harper Lee’S Go Set A Watchman And Growing Up, Allen Mendenhall
Children Once, Not Forever: Harper Lee’S Go Set A Watchman And Growing Up, Allen Mendenhall
Indiana Law Journal
The narratives of Jean Louise in To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman are as consistent as lived experience, which is marked by disruption and contingency, ambiguity and rupture, fragmentation and complexity. Only the careless would have accepted Jean Louise and Atticus as one-dimensional, self-contained figures unspoiled by the mores, customs, and vocabularies of their white discursive community. Such a sanitized view of Jean Louise and Atticus erases and rewrites rather than represents history in its disturbing, enlightening variety and complexity. Jean Louise and Atticus are not stock character types; their thoughts and behaviors are irreducible and inexhaustible.
Lee’S Atticus Finch Represents A Will To Change, Mary Ellen Maatman
Lee’S Atticus Finch Represents A Will To Change, Mary Ellen Maatman
Mary Ellen Maatman
No abstract provided.
Liberating Lawyers: Diverging Parallels In Intruder In The Dust And To Kill A Mockingbird, Rob Atkinson
Liberating Lawyers: Diverging Parallels In Intruder In The Dust And To Kill A Mockingbird, Rob Atkinson
Scholarly Publications
Professor Atkinson hopes William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust will replace Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird as our favorite story of lawyerly virtue. In both stories, a white male lawyer and his protégé try to free a black man falsely accused of a capital crime. But below these superficial similarities, Professor Atkinson finds fundamental differences. To Kill a Mockingbird, with its father-knows-best attorney, Atticus Finch, celebrates lawyerly paternalism; Intruder in the Dust, through its aristocratic black hero, Lucas Beauchamp, and his lay allies, challenges the rule of lawyers, if not law itself. The first urges us to …
Comment On Steve Lubet: Reconstructing Atticus Finch, Rob Atkinson
Comment On Steve Lubet: Reconstructing Atticus Finch, Rob Atkinson
Scholarly Publications
No abstract provided.
Moral Icons: A Comment On Steven Lubet's Reconstructing Atticus Finch, William H. Simon
Moral Icons: A Comment On Steven Lubet's Reconstructing Atticus Finch, William H. Simon
Faculty Scholarship
Atticus Finch's conduct would have been justified by the bar's conventional norms even if he had known Tom Robinson to be guilty. That fact, however, is not the source of the admiration for him that To Kill a Mockingbird has induced in so many readers. That admiration depends on the clear premise of the novel that Finch plausibly believes that Tom Robinson is innocent. Thus, the bar's invocation of Finch as a sympathetic illustration of its norms is misleading. The ethics of the novel are quite different from those of the bar.
The Death Of An Honorable Profession, Carl T. Bogus
The Death Of An Honorable Profession, Carl T. Bogus
Indiana Law Journal
No abstract provided.