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45 Ala. L. Rev. 483 (1993-1994)
Without Tradition and Within Reason: Judge Horton and Atticus Finch in Court

handle is hein.journals/bamalr45 and id is 491 raw text is: WITHOUT TRADITION AND WITHIN REASON: JUDGE HORTON AND ArTIcus FINCH IN COURT Claudia Johnson* The most ardent and available testimony to the continuing importance of the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird,' comes, not from students of literature, but from students of the law. Many attorneys have asserted that Harper Lee's portrait of Atticus Finch has been a hero and a model for them on a very personal or individual plane. Indeed, Atticus Finch seems to have resur- faced in the legal consciousness in the face of recent attacks on lawyers as callous and greedy. As David Margolick, legal writer for the New York Times, describes Finch, he is a man who taught a community and his two young children about justice, decency and tolerance, and who drove a generation of real-life Jems and Scouts to become lawyers themselves.2 Indisputable evidence of the novel's long-standing influence and its currency can be found in 1992 when, one might argue, Atticus Finch himself was accused and tried in the popular legal press. Finch, the small-town lawyer who had been accused by his townspeople in 1935 of excessive love of black people, was, in 1992, being charged with racism. On this occasion, some thirty years after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, some of the * Professor of English, The University of Alabama, 1972 to the present. My thanks to friends and colleagues Bryan Fair, Larry Harbin, David Lowe, and to editor, computer consultant, and husband, Vernon Johnson. I would like to mention in particular Professor Wythe Holt, an especially valued source of sage advice who also introduced me to the mysteries of legal citation, as well as Catherine Johnson, a source of inspiration who, like Atticus Finch, is both a voracious reader and a practicing attorney, and like Harper Lee, a creative woman of independence. Much of the research for this study was done while working on an article, The Secret Court of Men's Hearts: Code and Law in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, in STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION 129 (1991) and a book, THRmATENiNG BOUNDARIES: HARPER LEE'S To KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (forthcoming 1994) (on file at Twayne Publi- cations and with author). 1. HARPER LEE, To KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (Warner Books 1982). 2. David Margolick, Chipping Away at Atticus Finch's Pedestal, N.Y. TIMES, Feb. 28, 1992, at B7. 483