To Kill a Mockingbird is 50!
Atticus Finch, America's most beloved lawyer -- and father, is as inspired as ever.
by Austin Sarat
“You know something, Mr. Cunningham, entailments are bad.”
Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird
To Kill a Mockingbird turns 50 this year, and 2012 will mark the 50th anniversary of the release of the film version. The novel won a Pulitzer Prize in 1960 and, in 2003, the American Film Institute named Atticus Finch the greatest movie hero of the 20th century. While it is fair to say that both novel and film have become staples of American cultural life, as they turn 50, we should ask: is theirs a legacy we should celebrate?
Set in a southern town during the Depression, its central character, Atticus Finch, an iconic citizen-lawyer, is called on to defend an African-American accused of raping a white woman. At the time of its 
release, readers and viewers of To Kill a Mockingbird were located in the era between Brown v. Board of Education and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As the controversy over the recent firing of US Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod highlighted, the quest for racial justice that Atticus pursued by no means has been fully vindicated.
Although Atticus is sometimes criticized for being too accommodating to the segregated world in which he lived and practiced law, he remains popular culture’s most important embodiment of lawyerly virtue. As law professor Steven Lubet recently observed, “Lawyers are greedy. What about Atticus Finch? Lawyers only serve the rich. Not Atticus Finch. Professionalism is a lost ideal. Remember Atticus Finch....Atticus serves as the ultimate lawyer. His potential justifies all of our failings and imperfections. Be not too hard on lawyers, for when we are at our best we can give you an Atticus Finch.”
However, To Kill a Mockingbird is of enduring value not just because it is a lawyer’s story, but also because it is a story of fatherhood and of fatherhood’s complex associations with the law. Told as Scout’s memory of her father (Atticus), her brother (Jem), and the town where she grew up, her tale of Atticus is highly idealized. As Scout puts it, “There just didn’t seem to be anyone or anything that Atticus couldn’t explain.” While many attend to Atticus the lawyer, Scout calls on us to attend to Atticus the father as well.
Indeed, legal scholars, since Freud, have called attention to the complex associations of paternity and legality. They have portrayed a deep-seated longing for paternal power and the overwhelming power that fathers exercise as basic to legal authority. One of the most famous of these formulations is found in Jerome Frank’s early 20th century classic, Law and the Modern Mind. There Frank suggested that law is a projection of a widely shared human need for certainty and security in a world of danger, and he offered a view of law as the father or, more precisely, as the father-substitute. “To the child,” Frank argued, “the father is the Infallible Judge, the Maker of definite rules of conduct. He knows precisely what is right and what is wrong and...sits in judgment and punishes misdeeds. The Law....inevitably becomes a partial substitute for the Father-as-Infallible-Judge....”
To Kill a Mockingbird shares with many mid- to late-twentieth century novels and films an interest in exploring the connections between law and fatherhood that Frank noted, offering readers and viewers a chance to consider what fatherhood can reveal about law and law about fatherhood. On its 50th anniversary we are again reminded of the role that fathers and fatherhood play in cultural imaginings of law and in exemplifying the various faces of law’s power. Atticus Finch is a father and a lawyer committed to a particular vision of both fatherhood and law --one in which both can transcend, if not transform, the context in which they exist, one in which an orientation toward the future takes precedence over controlling the present, one in which the temporal horizon of law and fatherhood is kept firmly in view. In Atticus, law and fatherhood are both powerful and yet limited in their power, both existing in the present but oriented toward an as yet unrealized future.
To Kill a Mockingbird offers our era a view of law and fatherhood quite different from Jerome Frank’s imagining. Atticus Finch and the legal commitments he exemplified are focused on becoming as much as on being, and on the quest for racial justice as a lived experience for his children. Atticus as father/lawyer is a bridge between past and future. The past weighs heavily on Atticus, even as he tries to point his children toward a better future. What Scout calls “bad” entailments are legacies against which Atticus sets himself, the legacies of racism, race privilege, and violence, which in the mid-twentieth century American south remained powerfully in place.
In setting himself against those legacies, the father offers his children an example, a different way of being in the world, a model of adult values and sensibilities that oppose racism and racial stereotyping of the kind that showed their ugly face in the Shirley Sherrod incident. His example is as relevant in today’s supposedly post-racial era as it was in the heyday of the Civil Rights movement. It is worth celebrating as To Kill A Mockingbird’s turns 50.
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College and the editor of Law and the Stranger (The Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought).
