Rob Atkinson

Liberating Lawyers: Divergent Parallels In Intruder In The Dust And To Kill A Mockingbird

Professor Atkinson hopes William Faulkners Intruder in the Dust will replace Harper Lees To Kill a Mockingbird as our favorite story of lawyerly virtue. In both stories, a white male lawyer and his protege 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 serve others in a way that confirms our superiority in a system we have made in our own image; the second engages us in a dialogue with those who may be able to help us make our common world better than we alone could ever have imagined. Beyond this comparison, Professor Atkinson invites us to wonder why we prefer the more comforting tale to the more challenging. In his view, the fault lies largely with contemporary legal education. Even as that education recommends our using the law to liberate others, it fails to free us from our own prejudices and preconceptions. Current calls for more skills training and doctrinal scholarship both reflect and exacerbate this failure. Although Professor Atkinson doubts that literature can lead us to eternal, transcendent values, he believes that it can open us to new possibilities of personal virtue and social justice. Like the Socratic dialogues, Intruder in the Dust makes us examine our lives in dialogue with others. That, Professor Atkinson concludes, is both its principal lesson for us lawyers and its best claim for elevation in our canon.

What Is It Like to Be Like That?: The Progress of Law and Literature's 'Other' Project

A central interest of the modern law and literature movement has been how literature can show lawyers what it is like to be different from what they are – in a word, “other.” This essay examines the course of that “other” project through three critical phases: the taxonomic, which purported to give lawyers an external account of others, the better to serve their own clients; the empathetic, which has tried to give lawyers an internal account of others, the better to enable lawyers to improve the lot of those others; and the exemplary, which holds up models of how lawyers themselves might be more firmly and effectively committed to the commonweal, particularly the good of others less well-off. It argues that the law and literature movement should embrace this third phase of the “other” project. Although analytically last, this phase is chronologically first, anticipated in Platos Republic. This essay concludes by placing the exemplary phase of the “other” project at the center of the law and literature movements mission, with the Republic at the core of the movements canon.