Books

Old Lady Lawyer: The Power of Fiction

Harper Lee was a luminary in the legal world, even though she was not a lawyer.

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old lady lawyer elderly woman grandmother grandma laptop computer Two luminaries in the legal world are gone: Justice Antonin Scalia and novelist Harper Lee. So much has been written and said about Justice Scalia that I won’t say anything further. (Do I hear sighs of relief?)

Harper Lee was a luminary in the legal world, even though she was not a lawyer. Her father was a lawyer and editor of the local paper in Monroeville, Alabama, and she studied law but dropped out shortly before finishing. For many of us dinosaurs, her book To Kill a Mockingbird was a reason, perhaps for some of us, the reason, many of us became lawyers. (No, I haven’t read her recently published book Go Set a Watchman, and I won’t. Some iconic characters, such as Atticus Finch should remain unsullied in my mind. Yes, I know we all have feet of clay, but I’m not ready to concede that about Atticus.)

Published in 1960, To Kill A Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961, and in 2007, President George W. Bush awarded Harper Lee the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (You can YouTube the ceremony.)

Hopefully, the millennials who read this column have read To Kill A Mockingbird. If not, download it to your e-reader and get started. Alternatively, stream the movie on whatever platform you use. This is one movie that hews pretty closely to the novel. The book was an essential read in many schools for many years, and it played a part, either consciously or not, in people of my generation deciding to become lawyers. Just ask dinosaur lawyers who their favorite fictional lawyer character was.

When I learned that Harper Lee had died, I looked for my copy of the book. My paperback copy is thirty years old (I know, older than some of you) and the print, which was easily read thirty years ago, now requires the use of reading glasses at ever increasing power. However, the power of Ms. Lee’s novel is as true for me as when I first read it in the early 1960s. A story of racism and injustice in the rural South, it is as timely today as it was when published.

Why did this novel affect me so? Why did it affect so many others of my generation? The novel spoke to values, to human decency and civility, to the effect that one man can have in the search for justice, however thwarted that might be by the actions of others. It spoke to the power of the law and the limits of it. It spoke to the difference that one lawyer can make. I, for one, was enchanted by the possibility that someday I could make a difference as a lawyer.

Although some readers today dismiss the book as boring and irrelevant, I think they need to understand history, the context of the times in which the book was set and when the book was written. In some ways, so much has changed and in some ways, there is so much change yet to come, but the values that Atticus Finch represents are immutable.

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Remember the context of the times in which the novel was published. The Supreme Court had decided Brown v. Board of Education six years before. Segregation was alive and well in the land, especially in states like Alabama where Ms. Lee lived and wrote.

States were dragging their feet implementing Brown. It was two years before federal troops were sent into Mississippi to help James Meredith enroll in Ole Miss. (Google that.)

Alabama Governor George Wallace (Google him) subsequently proclaimed “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” (YouTube has several versions of these incendiary remarks, made as part of his gubernatorial inaugural address in 1963.) It was three years before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King spoke of his dream on the Mall in Washington, D.C. It was four years before passage of the Civil Rights Act and five years before Selma. It was a time of tumult and change.

Although set in the 1930s in rural Alabama, the principles and values of Atticus Finch were and remain those to which I think every lawyer should aspire. I don’t think Atticus Finch cared about the business of lawyering, a relatively new concept for those lawyers who started practice or in the throes of practice when Bates v. State Bar of Arizona was decided in 1977. I think Atticus cared about representing his clients zealously and to the best of his ability, standing up for the little person, the one who had no voice and who needed Atticus’s voice to speak. Those qualities of lawyering haven’t changed and hopefully they won’t, given how many changes the profession sees these days.

To Kill A Mockingbird is more than just a story about a widower lawyer, his two children, his housekeeper, his neighbors and his clients in rural Alabama. It’s the story of how one lawyer can try to make a difference, and even in failing, shows that it’s worth the effort to try. It’s a story of timeless values, of humanity and its lack thereof. Some things never change, and those never will.

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Almost sixty years after its publication, Harper Lee’s legacy lives on. Through this novel, she recognized the critical role that lawyers play in a civil society. There’s a line in the book that is also in the movie and I can still see that scene vividly. [Spoiler alert] Scout, the young narrator and daughter of Atticus, sitting in the “colored balcony” of the courtroom, hears the guilty verdicts for Tom Robinson, a black tenant farmer accused of rape by one of the town’s poor whites. She sees her father make that lonely walk down the middle aisle after his client is remanded to custody. Reverend Sykes, also in the balcony, tells Scout to “…stand up. Your father’s passin’.” I, for one, will do the same for Harper Lee.

Jill Switzer is closing in on 40 (not a typo) years as a active member of the State Bar of California. Yes, folks, California, that state west of the Sierra Nevada, which everyone likes to diss. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see old lawyers, young lawyers, and those in-between interact — it’s not always pretty. You can reach her by email at [email protected].

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