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I know what you're thinking: why the hell would someone write a review of a forty-year-old book which just about everyone in my generation was forced to read in junior high? The reason is simple. With the exception of the Bible, no other book has more important things to say about the difference between right and wrong and how one should live his or her life. Pick it up again, or read it for the first time, and I hope you'll agree with me.

As a recent graduate of the University of Notre Dame Law School, To Kill a Mockingbird has special significance for me. David Link, the former dean, used the book (as well as the excellent film) as the focal point for his legal ethics class. While this may seem a little hokey at first, Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has as much to offer as the more serious works of scholars like Aristotle, Aquinas, and Holmes. Any lawyer concerned about ethics should read carefully and seriously consider adopting Atticus Finch as a role model.

The backdrop of the novel is Alabama during the Great Depression. The narrator is the precocious Scout Finch. While much of the novel deals with the usually humorous misadventures of the 8-year-old heroine, at the heart of the story is the trial of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Scout's father Atticus is the defense attorney in the controversial case. Lee deftly handles the racial issues in her book, but perhaps no less impressive is the way she depicts the trials and triumphs of young Scout. The novel is at its best when it intertwines the rape trial with Scout's experiences. It is then that the complicated racial issues are stripped down to their essentials and interpreted through the simple and innocent eyes of a child.

While the reader will most likely identify with Scout, the inexperienced character struggling to come to terms with the angles and curves life throws at her, the reader should aspire to follow the example of Scout's father Atticus. Atticus is awe-inspiring (a fact which is perhaps most effectively shown in the film-version), but like the prophets of old, he is unappreciated in his own time-at least by the vast majority of his fellow white neighbors. His courage in the face of adversity and his willingness to place his own beloved family at risk in order to do what he knows in his heart is right should be a lesson for all of us, lawyers and non-lawyers alike.

So go ahead: dust off your copy or head down to the local library or Borders to pick up the fortieth anniversary edition. Take your time reading it and think about what it is saying. I think you will be surprised to find that Lee's novel is just as relevant today as it was when it was first published. That is truly the mark of a great book, and To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the best.

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(Submitted 8/29/00 by Notre Dame law student Julio.)