Even Mockingbird's Original Atticus Finch Was No Paragon

WASHINGTON - July 13, 2015 - PRLog -- Many have expressed concern and sadness that Atticus Finch - "the most venerated figure in American jurisprudence" according to the New York Times - turns out to be a segregationist in Lee Harper's new book "Go Set a Watchman," which serves as a sequel to her original and widely popular "To Kill A Mockingbird."

But even the Atticus Finch, lauded in the original book for defending an African American in a town seeped in racial animus if not hatred for blacks, was far from a paragon that future lawyers should look up to, according to former law professor Monroe Freedman, the father of modern legal ethics, says public interest law professor John Banzhaf, who taught with Friedman.

Freedman noted that Finch did not volunteer to defend Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman, but rather did so only because he was appointed by the court to do so,

Freedman also wrote: "Atticus Finch never in his professional life voluntarily takes a pro bono case in an effort to ameliorate the evil — which he himself and others recognize — in the apartheid of Maycomb, Ala.”finch

“Throughout his relatively comfortable and pleasant life in Maycomb, Atticus Finch knows about the grinding, ever-present humiliation and degradation of the black people of Maycomb; he tolerates it; and sometimes he even trivializes and condones it,” noted Friedman.

Predicting, long before the sequel was discovered much less printed, Friedman prophetically wrote: "For Finch, the civil rights movement of the 1960s is inevitable, but decades too soon.”

While - perhaps by the standards of his day and the small-town Southern customs of Maycomb - Finch may have been somewhat better than the other lawyers with whom he practiced, he was no model of virtue and ethics for young aspiring lawyers to look up to, suggests Banzhaf.

Many lawyers have put far more on the line for unpopular causes and even clients who were hated, notes Banzhaf.

JOHN F. BANZHAF III, B.S.E.E., J.D., Sc.D.
Professor of Public Interest Law
George Washington University Law School,
FAMRI Dr. William Cahan Distinguished Professor,
Fellow, World Technology Network,
Founder, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH)
2000 H Street, NW
Washington, DC 20052, USA
(202) 994-7229 // (703) 527-8418
http://banzhaf.net/ @profbanzhaf