July 11 marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, an American classic. It is worth asking on this occasion: “What would Atticus Finch do?” in today’s challenging and complicated legal environment. His approach to the everyday challenges of lawyering, I suggest, has stood the test of time and can still prove instructive to practitioners and citizens alike today.
I identified with Atticus Finch immediately upon first reading Lee’s book on its publication in 1960. For it was in that year that I had to face up, as a 28-year-old lawyer, to a dreadful tragedy. My wife and I had married in 1955 and were blessed by the arrival in quick succession of three fine sons. Ten days before the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, on the morning of July 1, 1960, a head-on automobile collision took the life of my wife and inflicted multiple skull fractures and severe brain damage on our infant son, Peter, aged four months. His life hung in the balance for a time, and it was only after six months of loving care from the Sisters of Mercy in our hometown of Pittsburgh that he was able to return home from the hospital just before Christmas.
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