Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer.John Grisham's latest is a legal thriller for young readers.
Theo Boone is a kid, just 13 years old, but everyone around Strattenburg says he knows more about the law than some of the lawyers in town. The ability he comes by naturally: both of his parents are attorneys. Theo's ardent desire for a career in the law, however, is more of an oddity. As his uncle says, "Most kids dream of being a policeman, or a fireman, or a great athlete or actor. I've never seen one so taken with the idea of being a lawyer."
The best Theo can come up with as an answer is "Everybody's gotta be something," but there's something more ticking inside of this kid, whose screen name is TBOONEESQ and who named his dog Judge. He's a Ferris Bueller whose idea of a day off involves cutting classes so he can slip into the courthouse and watch a trial.
In my middle school, Theo would have been rewarded for his lawyerly passion by getting pounded each day after classes. Instead, because this is a work of fiction, everybody comes to him for advice. The school secretary's brother has been hauled in for drunk driving. A buddy's parents might lose their home. A possible future girlfriend is going through the misery of a child custody hearing in her parents' divorce. Theo listens, taps a few keys on his laptop to find court records. Gives counsel --- which he, wisely, does not charge for, but which is generally sound -- and referrals to licensed practitioners in the needed specialty.
So when a big murder trial comes to Strattenburg, it's inevitable that Theo will end up right in the middle of it.
This is the set-up for "Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer," the first young adult novel from John Grisham. Like everything else Grisham writes, it will almost certainly be a bestseller. But let's not be churlish about Grisham's Midas touch -- he's trying to explain the world of law to kids who otherwise might only know the courtroom from television. And Grisham wants you to know that TV gets it wrong, as Theo tells his classmates who will attend the first day of the murder trial with him:
"For those of you who watch a lot of television, don’t' expect fireworks. A real trial is very different, and not nearly as exciting. There are no surprise witnesses, no dramatic confessions, no fistfights between the lawyers." And, he tells them, with more than a bit of Grisham's teachy streak, very few people at trial are found not guilty: "About eighty percent of those indicted for murder eventually plead guilty, because they are in fact guilty. The other twenty percent go to trial, and ninety percent of those are found guilty."
This tendency to rattle off such facts in the way that kids might know a favorite pitcher's stats can be annoying, but it serves Grisham's purpose of writing a novel that serves as a primer on the law. He competently lays out the trial of Peter Duffy for the murder of his wife, Myra. The evidence against him is circumstantial, and the presumption of innocence appears to be weighing in his favor.
Grisham ends the story abruptly, and in a way that many young readers might find unsatisfying. But the story moves, after a rather slow start, and the pages seem to turn themselves. Think of it as your teenager's first airplane read, a rough-edged legal thriller that tries to teach young readers about the law while entertaining them. The cliffhanger, then, suggests that Grisham sees Theo as a franchise of books and movies. If he can get young readers excited about justice, he's doing good even while doing very, very well.
...and why the President’s nomination for Justice Stevens’ seat is so important?
let us know your answer in the comments.
Judith Resnik, Professor of Law, Yale University: Robert Cover's Justice Accused -- about courts in the time of slavery -- is the key book to understand that all judges and justices must struggle to decide what is "just" and therefore, that it matters who are justices are.
Orin Kerr, Professor, George Washington University School of Law: Alexander Bickel, The Least Dangerous Branch. Bickel's classic book considers the proper role of the Supreme Court in a democratic society. The book is almost 50 years old, but it remains very influential today.
Sean Wilentz, Professor of History, Princeton University: The most authoritative account of the court's evolution appears in the multi-volume Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court, although the series is still a good way from reaching the modern era. For recent, up-to-date, accessible considerations, see the contrasting evaluations in Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine, which covers the court since the Reagan years and focuses on personalities, and Peter Charles Hoffer's A Nation of Laws, which discusses the court as part of the broad sweep of the history of American law and jurisprudence.
Geoff Stone,Professor of Law, University of Chicago: Keeping Faith with the Constitution, by Goodwin Liu, Pamela S. Karlan, and Christopher Schroeder, which provides an excellent account of a progressive understanding of constitutional law.
Alan Dershowitz, Professor, Harvard Law School: The Supreme Court deserves less respect than it gets -- especially from lawyers, professors, former law clerks and the elite media. It is simply another political institution whose members trade votes, make calculating decisions and maximize their own power and interests. There’s no evidence that principles play a greater role in judicial, than in legislative or executive decisionmaking -- especially at the Supreme Court level. But, there is far more hypocrisy in the judicial branch, because its power derives largely from the pretense that it is applying neutral principles in a principled manner. (That is why it would have been far more honest for the 2000 election to have been decided by the legislative branch on overtly partisan grounds than by the judiciary on hypocritically principled grounds.) Most books by law professors about the Supreme Court are far too deferential. The books I recommend are exposé books like Woodward and Armstrong's The Brethren and those which follow in its tradition by relying on inside sources, leaks and unauthorized disclosures. And by the way, there is no Santa Claus!
Conrad Harper, retired partner, Simpson, Thacher and Bartlett LLP: The biographical essays in Mr. Justice, edited by Allison Dunham and Phillip B. Kurland, offer insight into several key Justices. Justices are not paragons, but real people facing difficult issues that implicate their life experiences. Justice Stevens’s essay on Justice Rutledge, for whom he clerked, reveals a good deal about what Rutledge and Stevens regarded as important to judging.
Jonathan Franzen, Author,The Corrections: The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson is the most underappreciated of Mark Twain's novels and one of the best books ever written about American slavery. It's about an antebellum small-town Missouri lawyer who dabbles in the new science of fingerprinting; it's also, deftly, comically, about justice in every sense of the word.
Alice Walker, Author, Overcoming Speechlessness: Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. In the character of Jean Valjean, Les Miserables shows that what society narrowly considers criminal behavior is often caused by impoverishment, hunger, and desperation to which society has made insufficient address. I too believe that most “criminal” behavior has desperation, and the kinds may be varied, at its root. A truly just society would mean no one who is starving, or seeing those around her starving, would be punished for stealing bread.
Tom Wolfe, Author, I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel: I can think of many good novels in which justice triumphs and many in which it crashes and burns. But as for how justice lives, I don't know how you can top Bleak House. Justice lives not in this world but in a play world. In Homo Ludens, the law is Huizinga's favorite example of . . . Man Playing. Not for nothing, he says, is a court of law called a court. It is by no means a case of mere linguistic coincidence. Justice, he says, is not a court of law's concern. The game is. Is there or has there ever been a prosecutor who got up in front of a jury thinking about justice? Has there ever been a civil lawyer who cared so much about justice that he would stand up in court and utter a word that wasn't paid for and put in his mouth? Of course not, says Huizinga. Homo Ludens! And there you have the story--and the message--of Bleak House. How would Dickens know? His first job was recording court testimony verbatim for newspapers.
Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States: The biography of Learned Hand, and other biographies of judges. There are especially good biographies of Justices Douglas and Blackmun.
Sandra Day O'Connor, Former Supreme Court Justice:The Elements of Style, Strunk & White
Michael Mukasey, 81st United States Attorney General: Apart from the usual advice on what to read before one goes to law school, which is as much and as broadly as time and taste will allow, my one "must read" would be any collection of essays by George Orwell that included "Politics and the English Language," which I used to have my law clerks read their first day on the job.
Adam Liptak, The New York Times Supreme Court reporter: Anthony Lewis' Gideon's Trumpet.
Ted Sorensen, Counsel to President John F. Kennedy:A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt
Robert M. Morgenthau, Former Manhattan District Attorney: Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a terrific little book called The Common Law. It gives readers a very good idea about common law and how it worked before we added complicated statutes and all the rest.
Richard T. Ford, George E. Osborne Professor of Law, Stanford Law School: Karl Llewellyn's The Bramble Bush tells the potential law student what she needs to know to get started thinking like a lawyer. And it will make her happy to be joining the profession. Duncan Kennedy's Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchygot me through tough times at law school. This book will let students who find law school baffling and disorienting know they aren't crazy or stupid.
The views expressed at Just Books are those of the individual writers and authors who express them, and do not represent the views of the Brennan Center for Justice.
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