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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Jekyll, Hyde, and Criminal Law

I am looking forward to Professor Nicola Lacey’s public lecture at Marquette Law School tomorrow. Lacey’s presentation, the annual George and Margaret Barrock Lecture on Criminal Law, is entitled, “Socializing the Subject of Criminal Law? Criminal Responsibility and the Purposes of Criminalization.”  More information and registration are available here.

For an engaging and succinct introduction to Lacey’s important writing on criminal responsibility, I would recommend “Psychologizing Jekyll, Demonizing Hyde: The Strange Case of Criminal Responsibility,” 4 Crim. L. & Philosophy 109 (2010). In this article, Lacey uses the classic Robert Louis Stevenson story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to illustrate some fundamental tensions in thinking about criminal responsibility.

First published in 1886, Stevenson’s novella concerns a distinguished Victorian doctor, Jekyll, who despairs over his urges to indulge in vice. Jekyll devises a potion that splits the good and evil sides of his personality into distinct identities.   The animalistic Hyde may gratify his lusts without any risk to Jekyll’s reputation, or so it seems. The plan unravels, however, as Jekyll loses the ability to control the transformations, and the Hyde identity becomes dominant. Along the way, Hyde commits a murder and eventually kills himself (and thus Jekyll, too) in order to avoid arrest.

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NEWaukee and How to Create the Most Awesome City on the Planet

Angela Damiani has a clear goal: “To make this the most awesome city on the planet.”

Note that we didn’t say “an easy goal,” we said “a clear goal.” But don’t tell Damiani that it can’t be pursued and there can’t be progress in getting there. In the six years since it began, NEWaukee, the organization she leads as president, has become a fast-growing  energizer and catalyst for community-building activities, particularly among young professionals.

At an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program at Eckstein Hall on Wednesday, Damiani said the jargon term for NEWaukee is that it is a social architecture firm. What does that mean? In short, NEWaukee is an organization aimed at consciously designing ways to shift a population toward a goal – and that goal is to make Milwaukee a place people think is attractive and appealing.  Which is where the ”awesome city” ambition comes in.

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