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Atticus Finch, In Context, Randolph N. Stone
Atticus Finch, In Context, Randolph N. Stone
Michigan Law Review
One summer night in 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy visiting relatives in Mississippi, was abducted by two white men, beaten, and shot; his body was tied to a fan from a cotton gin and thrown in a river. Emmett's "crime": being black and allegedly whistling at a white woman. Through the early 1970s, hundreds of black men had been "legally" executed after being convicted, usually by all white juries or white judges, of sexually assaulting white women; hundreds more were lynched and otherwise extrajudicially executed. This is the historical context of white supremacy essentially ignored by Professor Lubet …
Reply To Comments On Reconstructing Atticus Finch, Steven Lubet
Reply To Comments On Reconstructing Atticus Finch, Steven Lubet
Michigan Law Review
Reconstructing Atticus Finch was intended to be provocative, so I am not surprised at the strength of the responses. Neither should I be surprised by the continuing reverence engendered by the fictional Atticus Finch; as I pointed out in my original essay, he is our moral archetype. Indeed, it was the accepted nobility of the character that made my question worth asking in the first place. What if Mayella had been attacked by Tom Robinson? Would Atticus still be a hero? To ask that question about a lesser figure would inevitably invite stock responses. Champions of the adversary system would …
Reconstructing Atticus Finch, Steven Lubet
Reconstructing Atticus Finch, Steven Lubet
Michigan Law Review
Atticus Finch. No real-life lawyer has done more for the self-image or public perception of the legal profession than the hero of Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. For nearly four decades, the name of Atticus Finch has been invoked to defend and inspire lawyers, to rebut lawyer jokes, and to justify (and fine-tune) the adversary system. Lawyers are greedy. What about Atticus Finch? Lawyers only serve the rich. Not Atticus Finch. Professionalism is a lost ideal. Remember Atticus Finch. In the unreconstructed Maycomb, Alabama of the 1930s, Atticus was willing to risk his social standing, professional reputation, and …
Reconstructing Atticus Finch? A Response To Professor Lubet, Ann Althouse
Reconstructing Atticus Finch? A Response To Professor Lubet, Ann Althouse
Michigan Law Review
In one of her childishly obtuse moments, Scout, the narrator of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, denies that her father Atticus Finch is any sort of proper example of how a lawyer ought to act when cross-examining a witness. The prosecutor's crossexamination of the accused Tom Robinson has moved her friend Dill to tears: "I couldn't stand . . . [t]hat old Mr. Gilmer doin' him thataway, talking so hateful to him _" Scout, who has taken her friend out of the courtroom, explains: "Dill, that's his job . . . . He's supposed to act that way." Atticus, …
Comment On Steven Lubet, Reconstructing Atticus Finch, Rob Atkinson
Comment On Steven Lubet, Reconstructing Atticus Finch, Rob Atkinson
Michigan Law Review
Professor Lubet has joined a growing list of revisionists who question Atticus's standing as the paragon of lawyerly virtue.1 But Professor Lubet takes revisionism in a distinctly postmodern direction, if not to a radically new level. Atticus's previous critics have wondered how he could have overlooked, perhaps even condoned, the pervasive racism, sexism, and classism of the Depression-era South. They have even occasionally censured his paternalism toward his pro bono client, the working-class black rape defendant Tom Robinson. But they have never questioned either Tom's claim of innocence or the propriety of Atticus's advocacy of that claim. Professor Lubet questions …
Response To Steven Lubet: A Reaction: "Stand Up, Your Father [A Lawyer] Is Passing", Burnele V. Powell
Response To Steven Lubet: A Reaction: "Stand Up, Your Father [A Lawyer] Is Passing", Burnele V. Powell
Michigan Law Review
Professor Steven Lubet's review examines in the lawyering context the truth of Due de La Rochefoucauld's observation that "[o]ur virtues are mostly but vices in disguise." His question - one going to the very heart of what lawyering is about - asks readers of To Kill a Mockingbird whether they would be equally prepared to accept the fictional Atticus Fmch as the personification of the good lawyer if his black client, defendant Tom Robinson, actually committed the rape of the white woman, Mayella Ewell, for which he was charged. If Robinson was a rapist, how then does one square Atticus's …
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
Michigan Law Review
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. Steven Lubet does a good job of showing …