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A Lesson on Civil Discourse from Harper Lee

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A Lesson on Civil Discourse from Harper Lee SPOTLIGHT CLE: A LESSON ON CIVIL DISCOURSE FROM HARPER LEE CLE Credit: 1.0 ethics Wednesday, June 21, 2017 10:40 a.m. - 11:40 a.m. West Ballroom C-D Owensboro Convention Center Owensboro, Kentucky A NOTE CONCERNING THE PROGRAM MATERIALS The materials included in this Kentucky Bar Association Continuing Legal Education handbook are intended to provide current and accurate information about the subject matter covered. No representation or warranty is made concerning the application of the legal or other principles discussed by the instructors to any specific fact situation, nor is any prediction made concerning how any particular judge or jury will interpret or apply such principles. The proper interpretation or application of the principles discussed is a matter for the considered judgment of the individual legal practitioner. The faculty and staff of this Kentucky Bar Association CLE program disclaim liability therefore. Attorneys using these materials, or information otherwise conveyed during the program, in dealing with a specific legal matter have a duty to research original and current sources of authority. Printed by: Evolution Creative Solutions 7107 Shona Drive Cincinnati, Ohio 45237 Kentucky Bar Association TABLE OF CONTENTS The Presenter .................................................................................................................. i A Lesson on Civil Discourse from Harper Lee ................................................................. 1 THE PRESENTER Talmage Boston Winstead Attorneys 500 Winstead Building 2728 North Harwood Street Dallas, Texas 75201 (214) 745-5462 [email protected] TALMAGE BOSTON has been a member of Winstead's litigation practice since 1997. His practice involves all aspects of dispute resolution in commercial transactions. With more than thirty-eight years of business litigation experience in Dallas, Mr. Boston has tried jury cases and argued appeals all over Texas in both state and federal courts. He is board certified in both Civil Trial Law and Civil Appellate Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization. Mr. Boston served as the 2003-2004 Chairman of the Litigation Section for the State Bar of Texas and as the 2004-2005 Chairman of the Council of Chairs for the State Bar. For his leadership activities, he received a State Bar of Texas Presidential Citation Award every year from 2005 to 2011. In June 2011, he completed his three-year term as a member of the Board of Directors of the State Bar of Texas. He is also a past Chairperson of the Business Litigation Section of the Dallas Bar Association. Since joining Winstead, Mr. Boston has been one of the most sought-after seminar speakers at state bar and Dallas Bar Association litigation seminars, speaking on a wide variety of litigation ethics topics. He has also been a featured speaker at the ABA Annual Meeting 2012-2014, and at the state bar conventions of Texas, Arkansas, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Kentucky. Mr. Boston received both his B.A., cum laude, and J.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a member of the Dallas, Texas, and American Bar Associations and serves as the Director of the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth and the Dallas Bar Foundation. In addition, he serves on the Founders Board of the Better Angels Society, a non-profit that obtains funding for Ken Burns' films. Mr. Boston is the author of Cross-Examining History: A Lawyer Gets Answers from the Experts about Our Presidents, Raising the Bar: The Crucial Role of the Lawyer in Society, and Baseball's Tipping Point. i ii A LESSON ON CIVIL DISCOURSE FROM HARPER LEE Talmage Boston Two years ago turned out to be a bad year for heroes. A lot of people whom we'd held in high regard for a long time fell off their pedestals in 2015 – most notably: New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady got scarred by "deflategate" in January; Anchorman Brian Williams got thrown off NBC Nightly News in February for lying about his life story; General David Petraeus pleaded guilty in March for removing and retaining classified information without authorization; Bill Cosby's testimony in a sexual assault lawsuit was unsealed and released to the public in midsummer 2015, where he admitted he had drugged women in furtherance of his extra-marital sexual activities. But maybe the biggest fall from grace in 2015, though, came in July with the release of Harper Lee's second book, Go Set a Watchman. We learned that Atticus Finch, a man the world has held in the highest esteem for over fifty years as the hero of Harper Lee's book, To Kill a Mockingbird, and a lawyer who embodied our profession's Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct and our Kentucky Code of Professional Courtesy, may not have been as wonderful as we've always thought he was. Oprah Winfrey has called To Kill a Mockingbird "America's novel." Gregory Peck's career peaked with the Academy Award winning role of Atticus Finch. The Book-of-the-Month Club took a survey a few years ago and asked "Which book has made the biggest impact on your life?" To Kill a Mockingbird finished second only to the Bible. The American Film Institute conducted a poll to identify the "greatest hero ever portrayed in a motion picture" – Atticus Finch finished in first place. All the appreciation and renown that had been laid at Atticus Finch's feet for over half a century came crashing down last July with the release of Harper Lee's second book, Go Set a Watchman, which portrayed Atticus as something less than the grand champion of Civil Rights in America that he had been in To Kill a Mockingbird. In Watchman, to our amazement, Ms. Lee portrayed Atticus as a man who did not want the schools in Maycomb, Alabama, to be integrated promptly after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark rulings in Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 and 1955. He had a very different idea about what the Supreme Court meant when it said public schools should integrate "with all deliberate speed" as compared to the immediate timetable for integration advocated by the NAACP following the Brown decisions. 1 When news of Atticus' fall from grace in Watchman came down last July, like many others, I fell into a state of deep grieving. Let me explain why. As a Baby Boomer—born in October 1953, I was in grade school in December 1962, when the movie To Kill a Mockingbird came out. My parents took me to see the film when I was a third grader, and if ever a movie ever changed a person's life, Mockingbird changed mine. When I saw Gregory Peck standing tall as Atticus Finch in the Maycomb, Alabama, courtroom representing Tom Robinson to the best of his ability, with full blown integrity, charisma, and conviction, nine-year-old Talmage Boston walked out of the movie theater in Houston that night and said, "That's what I want to do when I grow up. I want to be a trial lawyer who stands tall in his community. When all my education is finished, I want to be like Atticus Finch." Lo and behold, I never changed my mind from that day forward, and I wasn't the only person who responded to To Kill a Mockingbird that way. In my thirty-eight year legal career, I've come across many attorneys who embarked on their quest to become a highly esteemed lawyer due to circumstances just like mine– aspiring to be Atticus Finch. In fact, our profession came up with a term–the "Atticus Finch Moment." The "Moment" being the circumstances that prompted the decision to become a lawyer. So without a doubt, over the last fifty years, Atticus Finch has been the single greatest role model for the legal profession –and nobody else has come close. He symbolizes the Preamble to the Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct as a lawyer who: "Had a special responsibility for the quality of justice;" "Zealously pursued his client's interests within the bounds of the law;" "Demonstrated respect for the legal system and those who serve in it;" "Sought improvement of the law, the administration of justice, and the quality of service rendered by the legal profession;" and "Rendered public interest legal service." Above all, he embodied the final paragraph in the Preamble to the Disciplinary Rules: Atticus' "conscience was the touchstone against which to test the extent to which his actions rose above the disciplinary standards imposed by the Rules." Put all of this information together and there's only one conclusion to reach. For over half a century, Atticus Finch has been our profession's Conscience-in-Chief. Six years ago, I re-energized myself over Atticus Finch. While serving on the State Bar of Texas' Board of Directors, I organized a full-blown tribute to Atticus at our state bar convention in Fort Worth in the summer of 2010 as we celebrated the fifty year anniversary of TKAM's publication. Before the convention, I wrote a long article for the Texas Bar Journal entitled "Who Was Atticus Finch?" To address the convention, I got six high-profile speakers to give their personal take on the importance of Atticus Finch in the grand scheme of all things legal. 2 All the speakers rose to the occasion and waxed eloquent about Atticus Finch, including former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, former U.S. Solicitor General and federal judge Ken Starr, and former U.S. District Judge and now the Dean of the University of North Texas Law School, Royal Furguson. Besides the remarks from those luminaries, I also spoke at the convention on the subject "What Lawyers Can Learn about Professionalism from Atticus Finch." It was so well received that I've now given it to state bar conventions all over the United States – and to five law schools in Texas.
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