JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Photo of Albert Camus by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Every month the SyCip law firm invites a guest to give a talk on their field of interest. Next Friday I am the featured speaker and I have decided to discuss lawyers in literature, leaving out John Grisham.

I’m glad I don’t have to talk about how I write because it is a deeply boring subject to anyone who is not me. There is nothing more aggravating than speaking to people who would obviously prefer to be somewhere else, and then soliciting questions and getting dead silence. Occasionally there are tears—why do people assume we will become close friends on sight and braid each other’s hair? What have I written to give that impression? I assume lawyers are a tougher bunch.

So I’m reviewing my topic. There are a lot of TV shows and movies about lawyers and comparatively few novels. There’s the Perry Mason series and John Mortimer’s Rumpole, but I’m not doing series so that also leaves out Nancy Drew’s father Carson Drew. Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel—there’s an erudite lawyer. Lots of lawyers claim to have been inspired by Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird—more likely Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in the movie. There’s Portia/Balthazar in The Merchant of Venice, who keeps Shylock from collecting a pound of flesh from Antonio because their contract doesn’t mention blood being shed (As my mother would say, “Pilosopo”).

Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, a novel about an inheritance squabble that spans generations, is crawling with lawyers, and a friend swears by Dickens’s Dombey and Son. I’m sure I’ve forgotten an essential character, so please remind me. There must be a ton of lawyers in Balzac. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the lawyer Shepherd plans to trap his client Sir Walter Elliot into marrying his daughter, the widow Mrs. Clay.

Another title jumped out of the Camus biography I’m reading: Jean-Baptiste Clamence in The Fall. I’d never read The Fall so I started on it today. Albert Camus died in a car crash on January 4, 1960; I’m belatedly declaring this my Camus month.

Where is my head? Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence! Mental note: Look up Henry James. Where there are property issues, there are lawyers.