Photo courtesy Have Wind Will Travel
The University of Memphis Law Review has dedicated its latest issue to addressing the legal questions raised in John Grisham’s works. It was inspired, in part, says George Scoville, who was editor in chief of this issue, by The New Mexico Law Review’s handling of Breaking Bad.
A couple of the topics the Review takes on: “The Rainmaker Film: A Window to View Lawyers and Professional Responsibility” and “The Litigators: Perceptions of Predictability, Definitions of a Good Outcome, and an Alternative to Mass Tort Trials.”
Scoville took time to answer questions about the project.
How did the idea come about?
As a student-run academic journal, our law review editors have a lot of say in what gets published every year. We are publishing a symposium issue this year, like the journal does every year — and this year we tackle the opioid crisis — but we also wanted to do something that would resonate not only with the legal scholarly community, which is the typical audience of a law review, but with the Memphis legal community specifically and the public at large. Studying and writing about law can involve translating mystical prose from dusty books and parchments, but it doesn’t have to be that way. A few years ago, in fact, The New Mexico Law Review published an issue of essays discussing legal topics that arise in the plot of AMC’s Breaking Bad. Their school and the show’s setting are both in Albuquerque. So we started to think about Memphis and pop culture. We kicked the tires on a few ideas, and we kept coming back to John Grisham. He’s from Oxford, Mississippi, not Memphis, but three of his novels, all of which became feature films, take place here: The Firm, The Rainmaker, and The Client. In fact, the protagonist of The Rainmaker is a “Memphis State Law” alumnus in the book. It seemed like a natural fit. Add to it that no legal academic journal has ever undertaken the project of relating legal scholarship to John Grisham’s stories, and we saw a real opportunity to do something that was educational, innovative, and ultimately fun and memorable.
Is there a general opinion of Grisham’s work in the legal community?
I’m not sure. I certainly hesitate to speak for the whole legal community, so I’ll say for myself only that entertainment is entertainment is entertainment, and often things like primetime network police procedurals, while gripping, take liberties with the law and do as much to misinform as they do to entertain. (It seems to be getting better in the era of larger production budgets that include technical advisors for the script writers, but I digress.). With Grisham, he’s an actual lawyer. He writes stories that are sometimes sensational — could you imagine a real-life Carl Lee Hailey standing trial for gunning down his daughter’s murderers in a courthouse lobby, for example? That kind of vigilantism just doesn’t happen in real life. But no matter how sensational they may seem, Grisham’s novels evoke themes that lawyers encounter every single day, ranging from racism and implicit bias to professional ethics to corporations spending out of their ears to enlist armies of white-shoe, “Big Law” attorneys to defeat little guys in David vs. Goliath battles across the country.
What is the most timely of Grisham’s works?
If I had to pick one that was most timely, I would name one of the most recent — Rooster Bar. Candidly I haven’t read the novel yet, but I heard Grisham talk about it at a book tour event at Parnassus Books in Nashville last summer. The novel recounts the high-flying game of cat-and-mouse between two law graduates, working in a bar (the Rooster Bar) and living above it, and the lender that enabled them to go to law school, which has come to collect. With so much talk about the “law school bubble” bursting, especially after the 2008 financial crisis, Rooster Bar seems like it hits a topic that would be at the forefront of a lot of people’s minds. But the important contribution Grisham makes, perhaps in both the legal and literary senses, is that his books tend to address timeless substance.
Could a layperson read the journal and understand/enjoy it?
I think so, yes. Part of what our journal editors look for in deciding whether to offer to publish something is clarity/readability. As a form of scholarship, a law review article should teach something new. That often requires setting the reader up with the pieces of the legal puzzle the author is trying to solve before walking the reader through the solution. Every submission in this book does a fantastic job on that point — and I think laymen will find the discussion of Grisham’s works in these articles invigorating, enlightening, and accessible. I learned a lot myself!
What, no The Firm?
Haha, I’ve been waiting for this question. What a law review article Mitch McDeere’s misadventures at Bendini, Lambert, and Locke would make. … For this project, we put out a few public calls for papers, and I was as surprised as you are that nothing about The Firm came back.
• The U of M’s Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change is hosting a really cool exhibit in the Ned McWherter Library. It’s called “Uplift the Vote: Everyone Should Have a Voting Story,” which emphasizes the importance of voting.
They are calling it a dual exhibit. It will be set up in a tent that will be erected in the rotunda of the library.
The tent is representative of the tent city set up by African Americans demanding their voting rights in Fayette County. Inside the tent are displays of that time.
Daphene R. McFerren, daughter of John and Viola McFerren, two of the primary movement activists states that “The exhibit on the Fayette County, Tennessee, civil rights movement shows how committed people can engage in extraordinary strategies and tactics to advance social justice and equality. Their story should make us all feel empowered to create a more just world.
Along the outside are displays about modern voting efforts.
Organizers say it’s a call to action. And, along those lines, there will be multiple voter registration events held in conjunction with the exhibit and visitors to the exhibit can submit questions to the upcoming gubernatorial debate on campus on October 2nd.
“Uplift the Vote: Everyone Should Have a Voting Story” is September 18th through November 12th.
