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Moral icons: a comment on Steven Lubet's reconstructing Atticus Finch.

Publisher	Michigan Law Review Association
Publication	Michigan Law Review
Subject	Law
Format	Magazine/Journal
ISSN	0026-2234
Issues per Year	8
Volume	97
Issue	6
Published	1999-05-01

Role	Type	Name
Person	Criticism and interpretation	Steven Lubet
Author	n/a	William H. Simon

Related Content	Type
To Kill a Mockingbird	Lesson Plan
To Kill a Mockingbird	eNotes
To Kill a Mockingbird	quickNotes
To Kill a Mockingbird	Puzzle Pack
To Kill a Mockingbird	Activity Pack
To Kill a Mockingbird	AP Teaching Unit
To Kill a Mockingbird	Multiple Perspectives
To Kill a Mockingbird	Power Pack
To Kill a Mockingbird	Teaching Unit
To Kill a Mockingbird	Response Journal
To Kill a Mockingbird	Vocabulary from Literature
To Kill a Mockingbird	Salem on Literature

Atticus Finch's conduct would have been justified by the bar's conventional norms even if he had known Tom Robinson to be guilty. That fact, however, is not the source of the admiration for him that To Kill a Mockingbird has induced in so many readers. That admiration depends on the clear premise of the novel that Finch plausibly believes that Tom Robinson is innocent. Thus, the bar's invocation of Finch as a sympathetic illustration of its norms is misleading. The ethics of the novel are quite different from those of the bar.

Steven Lubet does a good job of showing that the...

[This journal article is 762 words long]