Atticus Finch--Part I

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (New York: Popular Library, 1962) (1960)

To Kill a Mockingbird won a Pulitzer Prize when it was published in 1960 and the film adaptation of the novel won an Academy Award for Best Picture of the Year. The book is used in secondary and high schools through out the country and my esteemed colleague Tom Shaffer once remarked that he didn't intend for any of his students to get through law school without reading To Kill a Mockingbird.

To Kill a Mockingbird is undoubtedly the most widely read and memorable books about a lawyer ever written in the United States. Atticus Finch has become something of a patron saint for many lawyers. (Can you name the lawyer protagonist in any one of John Grisham's or Scott Turow's books?) Atticus Finch is, quite simply, the most esteemed lawyer in popular fiction.

How does the presence of "boundaries," described in the opening chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird, serve as theme throughout the novel?

To Kill a Mockingbird is a story set in a place, a town, a community, and a region of the country. How does the sense of "place" evoked in the novel locate the story? And you as a reader?

Harper Lee locates Atticus in this place called Maycomb with this rather remarkable statement: "He liked Maycomb, he was Maycomb county born and bred; he knew his people, they knew him, and because of Simon Finch's industry, Atticus was related by blood or marriage to nearly every family in the town." [9] [All pagination is the Popular Library edition, 1962]

Scout, discussing with Atticus her disappointment and set-backs at school, repeats what she has learned from Atticus about the situation: "We could not expect her to learn all Maycomb's ways in one day, and we could not hold her responsible when she knew no better." [34]. It may not be so easy to learn the "ways" of a town or a place. Learning a place requires learning about people and learning about people requires empathy for those you're trying to learn about. Atticus suggests to Scout that if Walter and she had put themselves in Ms. Caroline's shoes they would "have seen it was an honest mistake on her part" to deal with Burris Ewell the way she did. [34]

One might assume that we can't (or don't choose) to take up law and life in a community in which we are born, where we know the people of this community and they know us. And even if being rooted in a place the way Atticus is in Maycomb is desirable (or preferable), we know that times have changed. The world has changed; we are all mobile now, many of us have become contemporary nomads. We live from place to place, vesting our lives in places other than where we were born, in places and with people we do not know. But we reassure ourselves in leaving home: at heart, we want to think, we are all much the same. People are people. How much difference can it make, ultimately, whether you live in Charleston or Morgantown, Weston or Beckley, Huntington or Wheeling?

Perhaps, it is more our work (as lawyers) that defines us than where we live. Atticus seems to be as comfortable in being a lawyer as he is living in Maycomb. But even Atticus has his limits. Scout reports that from early on, after representing the Haverfords for killing a blacksmith, for which they were hanged, her father had a "profound distaste for the practice of criminal law." [9]

Is it fair to say, as I suggest here, that Atticus was comfortable in the practice of law? Can anyone, today, expect to be comfortable in the practice of law? If not, what might go wrong? Should we be more uncomfortable about being a lawyer than we might want to be?

Are you comfortable or uncomfortable as a student of law? To what do you attribute your present comfort level?

With an interest in reading and early memories of reading we might ask or reflect on the course and shape our reading has taken. This matter of reading is of some importance to lawyers who must know a little about many things: we are asked to know something about people and what they do with their lives, what they do with and to each other, and what is done to them for which they seek redress. We must know something about how to "read" people and their situations.

Atticus was, I think, trying to help Scout understand what was going on at school with Ms. Caroline and what was going on in the law of truancy. One might say, that Atticus was teaching Scout to "read" the world, to see it less literally. She had, with Atticus's help, become a reader of books, but now she was being asked to read more than words and letters on a page. She was finding that her simplistic, literal way of seeing and reading the world did not work. Her new teacher needed more understanding than she was capable. She needed to learn to read the world with greater depth of understanding.

We read not just books but ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves. Alberto Manguel, in A History of Reading, makes a similar point about the wide net cast by reading as a

How might one's skills in "reading" make it possible to be more comfortable in the work we do as lawyers?

[To Kill a Mockingbird is, in a sense, a book about reading, the reading that Scout is learning to do, the reading that Atticus has taught Scout (and Jem). We learn that while Dill has not been able to elevate himself in the eyes of Jem and Scout by his self-proclaimed reading prowess, Jem's interest is piqued when he learns that Dill has seen real movies, including "Dracula." [12]. And we know that Atticus is a reader. Scout notes, about her father, that: ""Why, he's so tired at night he just sits in the living room and reads." [21-22]. Scout, later notes: "Sometimes when we made a midnight pilgrimage to the bathroom we would find him reading. He said he often woke up during the night, checked on us, and read himself back to sleep." [61]]

Imagine a story, novel (or for that matter any text) as having handles (or if you like, those places on the face of the rock wall in which climbers find, ever so carefully, to plant their feet as they make their way up the mountain). Without these handles or crevices/indentures/irregularities in the "wall" we would not be able to decide what a story/novel/text means. What are the handles for this story? Where do you place your feet as you pause, in reading your way along in this story?

Stories reveal themselves to us by genre, that is, a kind, or type of story. What kind of story is this? What does it mean to call it fiction? Harper Lee's father was a lawyer and she grew up in Alabama. Does this affect the way we are supposed to read the novel, e.g., as thinly disguised autobiographical writing?

Beyond this dividing line in literature--novel and non-fiction--consider To Kill a Mockingbird as

Roger Schank explains how our stock of genre stories works: “Explaining the work (at least to yourself) is a critical aspect of intelligence. Comprehending events around you depends upon having a memory of prior events available for helping in the interpretation of new events.” [Roger Schank, Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990)]

Robert Scholes, a literary critic whose work, I've always found instructive, argues that: “We can only read a story if we have read enough other stories to understand the basic elements of narrative coding. Our first stories are told or read to us by our parents, or other parental figures, who explain the codes as they go along.” [Robert Scholes, Textual Power : Literary Theory and the Teaching of English 21 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)]

One might try to speculate about and reflect on the repertoire of stories that you carry with you into reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Of course, no story, even one with multiple themes and motifs, will call forth a full index of the stories you have available for understanding a particular story. A story that made demands on your "full index" of available stories would result in something akin to cognitive melt-down.

We might ask again (and again), what kind of story is To Kill a Mockingbird? (And then we might ask: What kind of story is law? What kind of story is your decision to become a lawyer? What kind of story is your life?)

Allan Hutchinson, a Canadian colleague interested in stories and narrative observers that “We are all tellers of tales. Our lives are a struggle to imagine and enact the best stories we can.” [Allan Hutchinson, And Law (and Further Adventures of the Jondo), 36 Buff. L. Rev. 285 (1987)]. The problem is that we are not totally free in the stories we can live or tell. As Hutchinson puts it, “Only in our fantasies are we anywhere near free to indulge our dramatic imaginings to their fullest; even then we are not entirely free, for we must dream within the historic experience of our life stories.” [Id.] One constraint on our freedom is that we (and the stories we are to tell and make with our lives) enter a world, communities, towns, law firms that enact “habitual stories and stock tales of the community.” [Id.] If Hutchinson is right, and I think he is, any story that we read or live takes place within, among, and in opposition to existing “stock tales.”

Stories, viewed from one perspective, seem infinitely variable, bound as they are to particulars, nuance, sentiments, subtlety; ours stories, one might say are overdetermined by their difference. There is, I suspect, some in the way we think of art and creativity, individuality and personality, that lends intuitive appeal to this view of story. So, we speak of story and life, to suggest that each one is different, no two the same, no individual reducible or fully represented by another. A story or life is like a poem; it cannot be reduced, or reproduced by formula.

Yet, this view of individuality (a prominent feature in the American character, or should we say the character of America) and the way it shapes our sense that we are free to live any life we want, indeed, even to make up a life, never before lived must be tempered by another reality, a complementary view of the world--that we live our lives and tell and hear and interpret stories by way of patterns, or what Hutchinson called “habitual stories and stock tales.”

Scout comments on Dill's struggling under the fence that runs between the Finch property and Miss Rachel's collard patch, says to Dill: "Do better if you go over it instead of under it." [11]

When Scout presses too far with her inquiries about Dill's father, Jem tells her to "hush, a sure sign that Dill had been studied and found acceptable." [12]

On being challenged by Dill to get a closer look at what might be going on inside the Radley House and a look at Boo Radley himself, Dill pushes him to action and Jem resists. He tells Dill: "Dill, you have to think about these things. . . ." [18]

On how to be a first grade student: Miss Caroline is displeased when she discovers that Scout is literate. "Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere with my reading." [21] Miss Caroline is convinced that Atticus "does not know how to teach." [22] When Scout complains to Jem about the situation with Miss Caroline, he explains that "Miss Caroline's introducing a new way of teaching. She learned bout it in college. It'll be in all the grades soon. You don't have to learn much out of books that way—it's like if you wanta learn about cows, you go milk one, see?" [23] Jem tells Scout the new method of teaching reading is called the Dewey Decimal System. [23]

On how to be a neighbor: The Radleys are not much in the way of being neighbors. They have simply dropped out. Mr. Radley, out for his morning walk, greets Scout and Jem's subdued good mornings with a cough. [16] There is as well, the problem of Jem and Scout, and the difficulty they have in being good neighbors because of their insatiable curiosity about Boo Radley. And there's the incident when Jem and Scout build a snowman in the likeness of Mr. Avery [71-72], the kind of likeness that has Atticus explain to Jem that there must be some modifications on the snowman: "I don't care what you do, so long as you do something, said Atticus. 'You can't go around making caricatures of the neighbors.' " [72]

To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel replete with teachers: Atticus (teaching his children and his community); Calpurnia (teaching Scout and Jem); Ms. Caroline (Scout's first grade teacher).

On Ms. Caroline: We might ask, how does she get herself into so much trouble? Do you see something of the young lawyer, the recent law school graduate, in Ms. Caroline? (Remember Harry Seagraves observation about Carl Bonner, in Paris Trout, that he had fallen prey to his education, law school being a place that blesses its graduates with too much confidence. Is there something in this dousing of the student in what Karl Llewellyn called the “cynical acid” of realism that takes place–perhaps in a counterfeit way–in the first year of law school?)

And since we are drawing analogies from Ms. Caroline’s problems is there a connection between Scout’s fellow students and the what we find in law school: “Miss Caroline seemed unaware that the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature.” [21]

Atticus Finch, the Maycomb, Alabama lawyer in Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird, provides a wonderful literary example of the internalization of zealousness and its ritual re-appearance in a virtuous act of courage.

Appointed by Judge Taylor to represent Tom Robinson, a black man charged with the rape of a white woman in 1930's Maycomb, Alabama, Atticus doesn't "decide" whether he is going to represent Robinson. It is not, from what we learn about Atticus, a decision to be made. While the representation of Tom Robinson may have been the most difficult event of his legal career, Harper Lee does not present Atticus to us as a man who struggled over the decision. The implication (at least in its literary portrayal) is that Atticus knew what to do, knew what must be done, and did it. He didn't "weight" the possibilities and dangers of accepting the appointment, he didn't try to determine how the case might effect his political career, or the pressures it might create for his young school age children. Atticus was rational but not a decisionist. He did not act like he was facing a moral quandary, or even that he had a choice to make. (Atticus, when he learns that Boo Radley, instead of Jem, his son, has killed Bob Ewell, does face a dilemma and a decision: whether to protect the reclusive Boo Radley or insure that the "truth" be known about Bob Ewell's death.) Harper Lee has told the story of a lawyer known by his virtue and character rather than his problem-solving and decision-making.

When he takes the appointment to represent Robinson, Atticus does not need to figure out how zealous he wants to be on behalf of Tom Robinson. Atticus represents Tom Robinson zealously because his character, as a person and as a lawyer, makes it impossible for him not to do for Tom Robinson what he would do for any neighbor who sought his services. It is this kind of zeal and this kind of devotion to advocacy that makes the idea of a lawyer something other than the butt of common jokes.

In the account of Tom Robinson's trial the following conversation takes place among regulars of the Maycomb courthouse "club" on the day the trial begins:

Atticus, from what we are told and what we know about his character (not just what we read about it but what we know), will represent Tom Robinson zealously notwithstanding the virulent racism of the courthouse regulars and the jury that will be impaneled to hear Tom Robinson's case. We don't need much discussion to conclude that Atticus did the right thing and that it would have been wrong to succumb to the cynicism, hypocrisy, and bigotry necessary to let racists convict Tom Robinson with a real fight.

Atticus's zealousness on behalf of Tom Robinson is a reflection of habit and character, a story of a lawyer whose character cannot be bought by fear of what his neighbors will think or that his children may suffer ridicule. Atticus lives in a racist community, a community where it can be hard to be a good neighbor. Some Maycomb residents (we don't know how many) think that Atticus and his efforts to undo a system that condones racism is the problem. Atticus isn't oblivious to what his representation of Tom Robinson might cost him and his family, but he has the kind of character that leads to choices that don't turn on self-interest. Atticus's zealousness is part and parcel of his character, not just as a lawyer but as a father to Scout and Jem, and a neighbor to those who inhabit Maycomb with him.

If Atticus's story has bearing for us today, and I contend that it does, we might speculate that there will be times when it takes raw courage (and times when courage must be refined and distilled) to be a zealous lawyer, to stand up to a community hell-bent on doing the wrong thing. Atticus's habit of zealousness requires real courage. It takes the courage of character to stand up to a community. It takes courage to do what Atticus did and what you will need to do as a lawyer.

Zealous advocacy for Atticus Finch is a matter of telling the truth. The truth is that Tom Robinson did not rape Mayella Ewell. The truth will not be enough to save Tom Robinson from the savage indifference to human decency and moral blindness that racial bigotry has produced in Maycomb, Alabama. Tom Shaffer argues that Atticus's regard for the truth makes him a hero, a hero because he is not blinded by the prejudices of his community and is able to tell the truth to Maycomb. [Thomas L. Shaffer, The Moral Theology of Atticus Finch, 42 U. Pitts. L. Rev. 181 (1981)]

And how do we know that Atticus was telling the truth? How do we know that racism is morally wrong? We know racism was wrong in Alabama because Atticus, Miss Maudie, sheriff Tate, and Judge Taylor are there to tell Maycomb (and us) about racism and what it cost a community. We don't have to be moral absolutists to believe that something we know today was wrong fifty years ago. Even so, no discussion of Atticus Finch's moral character is replete until we are reminded (by some innocent moral relativist) that we can never say that a community like Maycomb, existing in a different historical period, was wrong to be what it was.

One student, confronted with Atticus, contended that Atticus wouldn't know what to do if he faced the kind of problems that lawyers face today! And what would this moral talk about the limits of zealousness mean to a reader of To Kill a Mockingbird who thinks that it is nonsense to hold Atticus Finch as a hero? Or to a reader of To Kill a Mockingbird who concludes that Atticus is indeed a moral hero, but only because he is "fictional," and while he is of "literary interest" is not of practical significance to those who do their lawyering in the "real world"? Or what would talking about Atticus mean to a reader who looks at the "progress" in race relations since the 1930's of Maycomb, Alabama, and argues that we have less need for the kind of courage that a 1930's lawyer needed?

Atticus is a hero because he stands by Tom Robinson as best he can and does so in a way that allows Tom to show his character and his courage, a moral stance that turns out to be far more costly for Tom than it is for Atticus (as the truth is always more costly for those who are marginalized by a dominant culture).

There are, in communities across the country, lawyers who have the courage and the character to do what Atticus did for Tom Robinson. And it is when we think about Atticus doing what he did, and what he had the character to do, that we think best of ourselves as lawyers. And it is when we think this way of ourselves that we are entitled to the moral acclaim that one is due as a zealous advocate.

It is because Atticus has internalized the ethic of zealousness and can reconcile it with the person he is, that he is able, without anguishing over it, to tell the truth and withstand the pressure exerted on him as he stands against the racists (including his racist neighbors) in his community. One reason we educate future lawyers to internalize the zeal for advocacy is so they can be zealous about truth when it is costly to do so. When advocacy becomes part of our character, as it was for Atticus, we are more likely to know what the truth is and how to tell it when the time comes. As Tom Shaffer and his colleague, the theologian, Stanley Hauerwas said of Sir Thomas More (drawing on Thomas Bolt's story of More in "A Man for All Seasons"we need the skills to speak truth to power. [Stanley Hauerwas & Thomas L. Shaffer, Hope in the Life of Thomas More, 54 Notre Dame Law. 569 (1979)] [Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (New York: Vintage Books, 1962)]

The problem, of course, is that this same zeal, twisted and perverted, becomes not a source of deserved pride, but a sword turned against colleague and community and a shield against moral criticism.

"The future of community depends not just upon political or even revolutionary action. It also depends upon our imaginative, rational, spiritual, and moral freedom to break free of our present, and to conceive of other ideal worlds."

--- Robin West, Jurisprudence as Narrative: An Aesthetic Analysis of Modern Legal Theory, 60 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 145, 197 (1985)

Is it possible to see in your quest to become a lawyer and in your phantasies of what lawyers do, a contemporary form of the journey of the hero? What problems do you foresee in employing the hero metaphor?

Dolphus Raymond, in To Kill a Mockingbird, tells Scout, Atticus Finch's daughter: "Miss Jean Louise, you don't know your pa's not a run-of-the-mill man, it'll take a few years for that to sink in--you haven't seen enough of the world yet." [204]. Is Dolphus trying to tell Scout that Atticus is a hero?

Robert Cover suggests that law is a bridge from the reality of the world (the world as it exists) to an imagined world-that-might be. [Robert Cover, The Folktales of Justice: Tales of Jurisdiction, 14 Cap. U.L. Rev. 179 (1985)]. Law, Cover reminds us, is one way of shaping the future. Law is a form of belief and a commitment to a particular vision of the future. This way of looking at law "is not a definition of law," Cover argues, "but a matter of social understanding, a form of committed social behavior that leads to the future." Consequently, "law can lay claim to only one perspective of the future, one which speaks to required behavior." Law is one social perspective among others. The nature of law remains, for Cover, a vital question and of continuing interest. "[T]he question of what is law and for whom is a question of fact about what certain communities believe and with what commitments to those beliefs." One of the reasons that law maintains its vitality is that our beliefs and commitments to law are, says Cover, constructed from "sacred narratives," from cultural experience "learned and expressed through sacred stories."

What possibilities for the lawyer hero do you find concealed in Cover's idea of law as a method of constructing a world, a self, and a life? How would one go about an education that fosters such imaginative possibilities?

The myth of the hero and the hero's quest are mythological motifs found in virtually all cultures; they are interesting to us as lawyers because the motif is so readily found in lawyer stories and the stories of those who have set out to become lawyers. Basically the heroic quest entails: leaving home, setting out upon a journey into the unknown, undergoing the trials and ordeals that test fortitude and skills and fate, and finally, when fate permits, returning home.

In The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949) Joseph Campbell outlines the mythical journey of the archetypal hero, and his description is not a dissimilar to that of the lawyer and law student as one might at first imagine. Campbell tells us that the mythic journey of the hero quest begins with a call to adventure. The call comes when "[t]he familiar life horizon has been outgrown; the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand." In moving away from the known world, the journeyer faces new experiences, and finds him/herself in a story "symbolizing danger, reassurance, trial passage...." The journey itself is a "fateful region of both treasure and danger . . . . [I]t is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delights."

On the heroic journey a transformation of self takes place, an evolution which comes from the way the hero understands himself and his place in the world. The stories of mythic quest show us how efforts to give life meaning "work out." It is in the contemporary urge to give our professional lives some kind of meaning, to give coherent form to a story of significance, that makes legal education, and other forms of professional training, a modern day analogue of the archetypal heroic journey.

The hero imagery and the story of the heroic quest are explored most fully in the magnificent and poetic work of mythologer, Joseph Campbell. [See Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949). For C. G. Jung’s exploration of the hero archetype, see "The Origin of the Hero," see C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation 171-206 (Volume 5, Collected Works, Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press)]

An empirical survey of the images that lawyers have of themselves confirms the importance of the hero archetype. [See Marvin W. Mindes, Trickster, Hero, Helper: A Report on the Lawyer Image, 1982 Amer. B.F. Res. J. 177]. Mindes argues that the image of the hero, along with the helper and trickster are "alternative images that both lawyers and laymen use to view, characterize, and classify lawyers and their behavior . . . ." [179]. Mindes however presents a different perspective on the hero than Campbell and Jung. For Mindes, the hero "seems best to depict the champion or representative of worthy causes, principles, organizations, or people. Not only a competitor, he takes the initiative in a series of struggles against enemies, generally expecting to best them by intelligent effort and self-faith. He combines honor with toughness or nonsentimentality. A person having this highly dramatic role has a strong feeling of being a hero, as we all need to be in the sense of being important, an object of primary value, a person that counts on the universe. He can expect to have his self-esteem sustained and rewarded by others who share vicariously in his battles." [180].

On the lawyer as hero, see Thomas Shaffer, Christian Lawyer Stories and American Legal Ethics, 33 Mercer L. Rev. 877, 888-893 (1982).

The social science research on professions has found other language to describe the myth of the hero. Becker and his colleagues for example in their study of medical students refer to the images and expectations that medical students bring to medical school as "general notions" about the profession which entail a "long-range perspective." [H. Becker, et al., Boys in White 69-70 (1961)]. The long-range perspective is not tied to immediate experience, is general in nature, and although vague may be emotionally intense. The long-range perspective is often idealistic in tone. For example, medical students are likely to have an image of the future which includes the self in the role of the ideal physician. [69, 72].

On women as heroes, see Lee Edwards, Psyche as Hero: Female Heroism and Fictional Form (1984)("The hero is a figure who, at least in potential, might oppose the most embracing of all cultural institutions, patriarchy itself." Id. at 14) [See: Lisa Lott, "The Female Quest: Journeys toward Re-naming Identity and Re-Claiming Wholeness of Self in Novels by Carson McCullers, Haerper Lee, Joan Didion, and Margaret Atwood," dissertation, University of Houston, Clear Lake, 1996]

"[T]he problem of heroics is the central one of human life . . . [I]t goes deeper into human nature than anything elese because it is based on organismic narcissism and on the child's need for self-esteem, as the condition for his [her] life. Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the signficiance of human life, a definite creation of meaning. Every society is thus a 'religion' whether it thinks so or not." [Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death 27 (1973)].

"Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials. *** It has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals. The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region. Or it may be that he here discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage.

The original departure into the land of trials represented [in myth] only the beginning of the long and really perilous path of initiatory conquests and moments of illumination. Dragons have now to be slain and surprising barriers passed-again, again, and again. Meanwhile there will be a multitude of preliminary victories, unretainable ecstasies, and momentary glimpses of the wonderful land." [Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces 97, 109 (Princeton University Press, 2nd edition, 1968)]

"Most heroic journeys involve going through a dark place--through mountain caverns, the underworld, or labyrinthine passages to emerge, finally, into the light. Or they may involve traveling through a desolate wasteland or desert to a green land. This journey is analogous to passing through a depression. In the myths as in life, the traveler needs to keep on moving, to keep on functioning, to do what has to be done, to stay in touch with her companions or manage alone, to not stop and give up (even when she feels lost), to maintain hope in darkness.

The darkness may represent those dark, repressed feelings (of anger, despair, resentment, blame, vengeance, betrayal, fear, and guilt) through which people must pass if they are to get out of a depression. It is a dark night of the soul, when in the absence of light or love life seems meaningless, a cosmic joke. Grieving and forgiving is usually the way out. Thereafter, vitality and light may return.

It helps to realize that death and rebirth, in myth and dreams, are metaphors for loss, depression, and recovery. In retrospect, many such dark periods turn out to be rites of passage . . . ." [Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women 289 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984)]

Robin West argues that Americal legal literature, "rests solidly on a tragic-romantic narrative base." [Robin West, Jurisprudence as Narrative: An Aesthetic Analysis of Modern Legal Theory, 60 NYUL. Rev. 145, 162 (l985)]. For example, the Declaration of Independence, "[a]s narrative, the document tells the romantic story of the 'birth of a hero,' a tumultuous ending and a new apocalyptic beginning. The American Rule of Law is the hero that triumphs over English monarchical authority. The parental authority figures are overthrown and replaced by a lawful, nonparental, and freer political utopia, an orderly society of 'desirable law' in which the free and the brave, through heroic and individual action, can exploit the apocalyptic land of milk and honey." 162].

Chandler B. Beach, The New Student's Reference Work for Teachers Students and Families (Chicago: F. E. Compton and Company, 1909)

[Used with permission of the Florida Center for Instructional Technology]

Scholarly Commentary: The best writing I have found on Atticus Finch is by Thomas Shaffer: The Moral Theology of Atticus Finch, 42 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 181 (1981); Growing Up Good in Maycomb, 45 Ala. L. Rev. 531 (1994) (see also his chapter on Atticus Finch in American Legal Ethics (1985); and a chapter in Faith and the Professions (1987)

.On To Kill a Mockingbird generally, see: Symposium: To Kill a Mockingbird, 45 Ala. L. Rev. 389-584 (1994); Claudia Johnson, To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries (New York: Twayne, 1994); Claudia Johnson, Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994)

On the Critical Commentary on Atticus Finch and To Kill a Mockingbird see: Steven Lubet, Reconstructing Atticus Finch, 97 Mich. L. Rev. 1339 (1999) [online text]; Monroe Freedman, Atticus Fich--Right and Wrong, 45 Ala. L. Rev. 473 (1994); Teresa Godwin Phelps, Propter Honoris Respectum: Atticus, Thomas, and the Meaning of Justice, 77 Notre Dame L. Rev. 925 (2002);Teresa Godwin Phelps, The Margins of Maycomb: A Rereading of To Kill a Mockingbird, 45 Ala. L. Rev. 511 (1994); Joseph Crespino, The Strange Career of Atticus Finch, 6 (2) Southern Cultures 9 (2000); Tim Dare, Lawyers, Ethics, and To Kill a Mockingbird, 25 Phil. & Lit. 127 (2001); Christopher Metress, The Rise and Fall of Atticus Finch, 24 (1) Chattahoochee Rev. 95 (2003); Eric J. Sundquistm, "Blues for Atticus Finch: Scottsboro, Brown, and Harper Lee," in Larry J. Griffin & Don H. Doyle (eds.), The South as an American Problem 181-207 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995) [see also Eric J. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge: Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005)]

For responses to Steven Lubet's efforts to deconstruct Atticus Finch as icon, see: Ann Althouse, Reconstructing Atticus Finch? A Response to Professor Lubet, 97 Mich. L. Rev. 1363 (1999); Rob Atkinson, Comment on Steven Lubet Reconstructing Atticus Finch, 97 Mich. L. Rev. 1370 (1999); Burnele V. Powell, A Reaction: "Stand Up, Your Father [a Lawyer] is Passing," 97 Mich. L. Rev. 1373 (1999); William H. Simon, Moral Icons: A Comment on Steven Lubet's Reconstructing Atticus Finch , 97 Mich. L. Rev. 1376 (1999); Randolph N. Stone, Atticus Finch, in Context, 97 Mich. L. Rev. 1378 (1999).

Claudia Johnson observes that To Kill a Mockingbird has received more critical attention from legal scholars than from literary critics. See Claudia Johnson, Without Tradition and Within Reason: Judge Horton and Atticus Finch in Court, 45 Ala. L. Rev. 483 (1995). In the years following Johnson's article, the articles on To Kill a Mockingbird have increased. See e.g.: Diann L. Baecker, Telling It In Black and White: The Importance of the Africanist Presence in To Kill a Mockingbird, 36 (3) Southern Quart. 124 (1998); Harold Bloom (ed.), Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (Broomall, Pennsylvania: Chelsea House, 1996); Laurie Champion, "When You Finally See Them": The Unconquered Eye in To Kill a Mockingbird, 37 (2) Southern Quart. 127 (1999); Laura Fine, Gender Conflicts and Their "Dark" Projectioins in Coming of Age White Female Soutern Novels, 36 (4) Southern Quart. 121 (1998)(examines several novels including To Kill a Mockingbird); Theodore R. Hovet & Grace-Ann Hovet, "Fine Fancy Gentlemen" and "Yappy Folk": Contending Voices in To Kill a Mockingbird, 40 (1) Southern Quart. 67 (2001); Carolyn Jones, Atticus Finch and the Mad Dog: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, 34 (4) Southern Quart. 53 (1996); Christopher Metress, The Rise and Fall of Atticus Finch, 24 (1) Chattahoochee Rev. 95 (2003); Dean Shackleford, The Female Voice in To Kill a Mockingbird: Narrative Strategies in Film and Novel, 50 Miss. Quart. 101 (1996/97).

The increasingly critical view of Atticus Finch in the literature is explored in Christopher Metress, The Rise and Fall of Atticus Finch, 24 (1) Chattahoochee Rev. 95 (2003).

To Kill a Mockingbird was adopted into an Academy Award winning film starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, and Robert Duvall, in one of his first film roles as "Boo" Radley.

For notes and materials on To Kill a Mockingbird viewed as a "morally instructive text" for students of law see: James R. Elkins, Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers (course website).

While exact sales figure are hard to calculate, there seems little dispute that To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the all-time top-selling works of fiction with sales exceeding 10 million copies. [See The 10-Million Mark, 57 (4) Literary Calvalcade 4 (Jan 2005)(Other novels reaching this level of sales include The Catcher in the Rye, Animal Farm, 1984 (George Orwell is the only author with more than one novel on the list), Catch-22, God's Little Acre (by Erskine Caldwell), and more popular fiction titles like Jaws, The Thorn Birds, Peyton Place, Gone with the Wind, The Godfather, The Carpetbaggers, and Valley of the Dolls.)]

To Kill a Mockingbird is also reported to be one of the top 10 books taught in U.S. public high schools. [See Top 10 Books Taught in U.S. Public High Schools, 57 (1) Literary Cavalcade 4 (Sept 2004)]

John Jay Osborn, Jr., Atticus Finch--The End of Honor: A Discussion of To Kill a Mockingbird, 30 U.S.F. L. Rev. (1996) [on-line text]

On the lawyer/hero image, see: Marvin W. Mindes & Alan C. Acock, Trickster, Hero, Helper: A Report on the Lawyer Image, 1982 Am. B. Found. Res. J. 177

On Legal Education as Heroic Journey, see: Thomas C. Galligan, The Monomyth Goes to Law School, 66 St. John's L. Rev. 129 (1992)

Regarding Atticus Finch as a tragic figure: "Mockingbird has at least some elements of tragedy: an innocent man (Tom) falls victim to evil despite the best efforts of the novel's hero. Atticus's story too is tragic. Regarding the rule of law as tremendously mportant, he presents his arguments in its favor to the jury with passion and all of his professional ability, recognizing that the life of an innocent man rests upon his success. But he fails, and Tom dies. . . . When Boo kills Bob Ewell, Atticus, cast as protector of b oth men, must decide whether he will allow another outsider to face the same threat [harm to innocents]. Confronted with the possibility of another tragedy, Attitcus's faith in the rule of law, and perhaps his courage as well, fail him. He cannot bear the possibility that he will be party to the death of another mockingbird." Tim Dare, the author of this tragic reading of Atticus Finch contends that Atticus's abandonment of his principles "is the stuff of tragedy: a principled man has come to doubt the adequacy of principles by which he understands himself and abaondons those principles." [Tim Dare, Lawyers, Ethics, and To Kill a Mockingbird, 25 Phil. & Lit. 127, 133-134 (2001)]