The second lecture in Mayflower Bookshop’s Great Crime series will be given by Tony Foster of the Department of English at Leiden University. Please note that this lecture will be in English. His talk, titled “Lawyers as Rebels or Collaborators: The Case of To Kill a Mockingbird,” explores one of the most famous courtroom stories in modern literature.
Published in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee quickly became a Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller and is still regarded as one of the great American novels of the twentieth century. The film adaptation, released in 1962 and starring Gregory Peck, won three Academy Awards and helped turn the novel’s central figure, Atticus Finch, into one of the most celebrated lawyers in fiction.
Maycomb, Alabama, the summer of 1935. The small, usually sleepy town is in an uproar. A young African-American man, Tom Robinson, stands accused of having assaulted and raped a young white woman, Mayella Ewell. Enter his court-appointed lawyer, Atticus Finch, who has become one of the great heroes of legal fiction. A hero not only in the eyes of his daughter Scout, from whose point of view we follow the trial and its effects on life in Maycomb. Generations of young Americans, too, have taken up law, inspired by Atticus’s professional and personal ethics – his defence of Tom comes at a cost to his family and himself – and faith in the workings of the law.
However, there is also criticism. It is clear that Tom’s chances of a fair trial in the racist deep south of the 1930s are very slim indeed, and this is largely due how American criminal procedure works. Circumstances Atticus can do very little to change, no matter how hard he works. But we will also see that in some respects, Atticus is ineffective and even incompetent, being the lawyer and person that he is. And that in general, lawyers may do more harm than good to the cause of justice by actually doing their job.
Sunday March 29, 2026: 16.00
Admission: Free
Mayflower Bookshop, Breestraat 70, Leiden