Date:
12.08.06
Living the Legal & Literary Life
Thomas Adcock
12-08-2006
Last night, three lawyers were declared winners of the annual New York Law Journal Fiction Contest and thereby joined the growing ranks of their professional colleagues who yearn to become the next John Grisham or Lisa Scottoline or Linda Fairstein or Scott Turow as attorney-slash-authors.
The mutual fascination of authors with the law and lawyers with writing is at least 300 years old - British novelist Henry Fielding, born in 1707, was a lawyer - with a dramatic uptick in the number of lawyer/authors traceable to the Watergate scandal of 1972-73, in which high-powered attorneys in Washington, D.C., were carted off to prison.
It was during that time of embarrassment to the bar, said Mr. Turow during a staged conversation Tuesday evening with Professor Thane Rosenbaum of Fordham University School of Law, that "the public realized they'd better watch lawyers carefully."
The obsessive interest in the drama of the legal world had arrived, Mr. Rosenbaum agreed: with a newfound sense of introspection, lawyers turned to literary venues, and an eager reading public made many of them best-selling authors.
"But once you get past the fact that both professions involve telling stories for a living, there's a world of difference," cautioned Mr. Rosenbaum in an interview prior to Tuesday's formal conversation, part of Fordham Law's ongoing Forum on Law, Culture and Society.
"One world is narrowly focused, results-oriented and intolerant of ambiguity. The other is expansive and open, drawn on a broad canvas, messy and unresolved," said Mr. Rosenbaum, director of the center and the author of "Golems of Gotham" and two other critically acclaimed literary novels.
He added, "The lawyer looks for closure, the novelist never expects that. The lawyer uses the term 'final judgment.' The novelist would never say that, would never think that way."
But Mr. Turow, whose many novels through the years have been recognized by reviewers as more substantial than mere legal potboilers, took exception.
"True, the law doesn't recognize ambiguity," said Mr. Turow. "But lawyers are completely fascinated by it."
Mr. Turow's appearance at the Fordham Law event, held in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, coincided with a publicity tour for his newly published novel, "Limitations," which The New York Times published last year in briefer form as a magazine serial. In the book, the protagonist Judge George Mason of fictional Kindle County, America, is confronted with three dilemmas: his wife's cancer, anonymous e-mails that grow increasingly threatening, and his presiding over a criminal case reminiscent of his own dubious conduct as a youth, long past the statute of limitations.
The protagonist poses what is likely the most painful question a member of the bench might ask, "Who are we to judge?" And concludes, in flaming ambiguity, "George has accepted that 'justice' is no better than approximate, a range of tolerable results."
Mr. Turow, unlike most of his fellow lawyer/authors, was a writer before becoming a lawyer. While an undergraduate at Amherst College, he won a writing fellowship to Stanford University, where he wound up teaching creative writing. But he soon tired of the professorial life and discovered his interest in law. That led him to Harvard Law School, then a term as an assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago, then to a white collar defense practice in the Chicago office of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, where he remains as a partner working on a reduced schedule.
"One L" was Mr. Turow's smash-hit, nonfiction account of his years at Harvard Law. He followed with seven internationally popular novels, including "Presumed Innocent," "Reversible Errors" and "Ordinary Heroes."
Mr. Rosenbaum, on the other hand, left his job as a litigation associate at Debevoise & Plimpton to wander the beaches of southern California in order to find his artistic muse. Besides "Golems," he has published the novels "Second Hand Smoke" and "Elijah Visible." His nonfiction includes "The Myth of Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What's Right."
While Mr. Turow writes about the law and lawyers, Mr. Rosenbaum avoids the profession in his fiction, preferring the Holocaust as literary context.
"I always wanted to be a writer," said Mr. Rosenbaum, the son of Holocaust survivors, "but I didn't think it was a job."
Following his beach period, Mr. Rosenbaum returned to New York where he found a berth at Fordham Law as a professor of human rights, legal humanities, law and literature.
"The artistic process is not the kind of thing you learn in law school," said Mr. Rosenbaum, who described that process as "writing what's in your stomach, what's fuming your internal design, the thing that's burning inside you, that's bothering you - the troubling piece of you, the withdrawn part, the grotesque part, the part you're hiding from."
Mr. Turow said the artistic process demands practice, which he defined as hard, tedious work.
"Sure, there are Mozarts and Truman Capotes and Gore Vidals who seem to spring forth from the head of Zeus - fully-formed artists at the age of 19 or so," said Mr. Turow, who began in earnest as a writer with a pen and pad on commuter trains. "But generally speaking, the artistic career requires practice."
He added, "Because [lawyers] use language every day, they sometimes assume they can be novelists. But if they assume that, then listening to music on their iPpods every day should mean they could perform at Carnegie Hall."
Mr. Turow's stock advice to would-be lawyer/authors: "A writer writes. You learn by doing."
He encouraged his Tuesday audience of 200 - largely a gathering of Fordham Law alumni, students and would be writers - with his belief, "In a world where there is so much we cannot control, the law is a noble institution, designed to make some parts of our lives more understandable, more just."
Mr. Rosenbaum added, "Lawyers are not people who are usually modest or shy. So it's not surprising to me that many harbor ambitions to author books. Besides, it's so cool."
- Thomas Adcock can be reached at tadcock@alm.com.
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