For Sale: George Zimmerman’s Property

Forsale2-300x236Most law school classes in Property begin with the venerable bundle of sticks metaphor.  The “bundle” includes those rights and interests held by the owners of property.  The assorted “sticks” take on different shapes and sizes, and owners invoke one or more of them to a different extent as the times change.  In the opinion of many, the right to sell one’s property has supplanted the right to use one’s property as the most important “stick” of  in the present.

The recent efforts of George Zimmerman to market the gun he used to shoot Trayvon Martin is a particularly distasteful example of an attempt to sell one’s property.  While patrolling as part of a self-styled neighborhood watch in a gated community near Orlando, Florida, Zimmerman confronted and fought with the seventeen-year-old Martin.  In the midst of the struggle, Zimmerman fired his 9 mm Kel-Tec PF-9 pistol and killed Martin.

Zimmerman was tried for the murder in early 2012, and the media absolutely feasted on the courtroom proceedings.  Zimmerman and his attorneys successfully argued the shooting was in self-defense.  Zimmerman was acquitted in February, 2012, and he publicly delighted in his victory at trial.  What’s more, the United States Justice Department at that point returned the weapon to Zimmerman.

This past week, Zimmerman put the gun up for sale on several gun auction sites.

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R.I.P. Harper Lee (1926-2016)

To_Kill_a_MockingbirdAmerican letters lost one of its legendary figures when Harper Lee died at 89 on February 19.  Lee’s beloved To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961, and it was the most popular of all twentieth-century novels by American authors.

Lee’s work also ranks at the top in the more specialized world of law-related popular culture.  Atticus Finch, the novel’s protagonist, inspired many to become lawyers and to work for equality for African Americans.  Gregory Peck won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1963 for his portrayal of Atticus Finch in the film version of the novel, and the respected American Film Institute has ranked Peck’s Atticus Finch as the greatest hero in the history of the cinema.  Heroism is hard to rank, but Atticus Finch is surely popular culture’s most important lawyer.

Sadly, Lee’s final years were full of controversy. 

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Atticus Finch Revisited

Atticus_and_Tom_Robinson_in_courtHarper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman has an undeniably odd publication history. Ms. Lee wrote the novel in the 1950s, well before she wrote and published her beloved To Kill a Mockingbird. When she finally agreed to publish Go Set a Watchman in 2015, it registered on critics and readers as a sequel of sorts for To Kill a Mockingbird.

Go Set a Watchman involves the moving rebuilding of a parent-child relationship after the child has lost respect for the parent, and this account deserves contemplation and reflection. However, the novel as a whole is only mediocre. Furthermore, many readers will be shocked and disappointed by the novel’s suggestion that Atticus Finch is not the heroic man they thought he was.

In particular, Finch is hardly a staunch defender of civil rights for the people he calls “Negroes.” He tells his daughter Jean Louise, who was known as Scout as a young girl, “Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.” He also reveals he is taking the case of an African American defendant so that the case does not fall into the hands of NAACP lawyers. In Finch’s opinion, the latter are too eagerly seeking cases they can rush into the federal courts.

If Finch is not the champion of civil rights people took him to be in To Kill a Mockingbird, his attitude about the law has supposedly remained consistent. Uncle Jack Finch tells Jean Louise: “The law is what Atticus lives by. He’ll do his best to prevent somebody beating up somebody else, and then he’ll turn around and try to stop the Federal Government if it is breaking the law . . . . [B]ut remember this, he’ll always do it by the letter of the law. That’s the way he lives.”

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