Fictional Attorney of the Month: The King of Hearts

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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland tells of a rather silly kingdom. And Alice observes the trial of the Knave of Hearts.

She easily identifies the King of Hearts as the judge "because of his great wig." She watches jurors writing their names in the event they forget them before the end of the trial.

As the trial begins, the judge/king accuses the Knave of Hearts of stealing the queen's tarts. But the King of Hearts has little sense in running a trial.

"Consider your verdict," the King said to the jury.

"Not yet, not yet!" the Rabbit hastily interrupted. "There's a great deal to come before that!"

"Call the first witness," said the King; and the White Rabbit blew three blasts on the trumpet, and called out, "First witness!"

At one point, the King of Hearts warns the Hatter to give his evidence or face execution on the spot, or that the Hatter must remember evidence or be executed. Certainly an intemperate judge. And then, as judge, he cross-examines a witness on the contents of the tarts, only to complain to the Queen, "Really, my dear, you must cross-examine the next witness. It quite makes my forehead ache!" And when Alice takes the stand (by now, a giantess), the king cites "Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court," which he claims is the oldest rule in the book, until Alice remarks that it ought to be numbered one if that were the case.

An executive acting as judge? This month's Fictional Attorney of the Month.

Fictional Attorney of the Month: Vinny Gambini

My Cousin Vinny is one the most delightful trial films of all time. Much of that is attributable to the Oscar-winning performance of Marisa Tomei as Mona Lisa Vito, Vinny's longtime fiancée.

But Joe Pesci plays the titular role, a novice attorney freshly admitted to the New York bar after successfully passing the bar exam on the sixth attempt. Vinny Gambini's first trial? Defending his cousin and friend wrongly accused of murder in Alabama.

What Vinny lacks in legal acumen, he makes up for in two major areas. First, he has a tenacity and relentlessness, despite his struggles. Years ago, he'd fought a traffic ticket in Brooklyn, and won. The judge was so impressed he went to lunch with him and encouraged him to become a litigator. Vinny's response? "I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, I don't know what a litigator is. I never thought of becoming a lawyer. But this Judge Malloy, who's from Brooklyn, too? He did it, so all of a sudden, it seemed possible. So I went to law school." (Note: this is probably not a good basis for deciding to go to law school. But it's Hollywood.) And Malloy serves a valuable mentor to Vinny.

Second, Vinny has the ability to see through the facts of the case and draw out the problems. He presents a beautiful analogy in evidence: "Building a case is like building a house. Each piece of evidence is just another building block. He wants to make a brick bunker of a building. He wants to use serious, solid-looking bricks, like, like these, right? He's going to show you the bricks. He'll show you they got straight sides. He'll show you how they got the right shape. He'll show them to you in a very special way, so that they appear to have everything a brick should have. But there's one thing he's not gonna show you. When you look at the bricks from the right angle, they're as thin as this playing card. His whole case is an illusion, a magic trick."

The scene is filled with wonderful courtroom humor highlighting trial tactics and occasional actual rules of evidence. And Vinny is this month's Fictional Attorney of the Month.

Fictional Attorney of the Month: Clair Huxtable

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While The Cosby Show may have been named after Bill Cosby, the entire case of characters in the Huxtable family were vividly memorable, including, of course, Clair Huxtable.

She was a partner at Bradly, Greentree & Dexter in New York City. While she didn't have the luxury of practicing from her home office, like her medical doctor husband, she did find regular opportunities to parent her children's off-the-wall adventures at home.

And, of course, she put her law degree to good use for her children's sake. In one episode, she helps her son Theo secure a refund for a batch of t-shirts ordered from a crooked salesman by invoking the warranty of usability. In another, she represents her daughter Sondra when a dishonest car repairman tries to scam her.

She has high expectations of her children--specifically, that they, too, would become lawyers. She anticipates that Sondra would go to law school after earning her undergraduate degree from Princeton, then expresses great dismay when Sondra prefers to work at an outdoor supply retail store.

It's her humor, her charm, and her wit that makes Clair this month's Fictional Attorney of the Month.

Fictional Attorney of the Month: Serjeant Buzfuz

Charles Dickens's Sydney Carton may be his most well-known attorney, but Serjeant Buzfuz is perhaps the most amusing. Mr. Buzfuz represents the widow Mrs. Bardell in a suit against Mr. Pickwick, the lead character in The Pickwick Papers, for a breach of a promise to marry.

In court, Mr. Buzfuz's rhetorical opening has its desired effect: "A visible effect was produced immediately; several jurymen beginning to take voluminous notes with the utmost eagerness." Some of my favorite, and deeply Dickensian, passages from the oratory to the jury:

Before the bill had been in the parlour-window three days—three days, gentlemen—a being, erect upon two legs, and bearing all the outward semblance of a man, and not of a monster, knocked at the door of Mrs. Bardell’s house.

...

These letters, too, bespeak the character of the man. They are not open, fervent, eloquent epistles, breathing nothing but the language of affectionate attachment. They are covert, sly, underhanded communications, but, fortunately, far more conclusive than if couched in the most glowing language and the most poetic imagery—letters that must be viewed with a cautious and suspicious eye—letters that were evidently intended at the time, by Pickwick, to mislead and delude any third parties into whose hands they might fall. Let me read the first: ‘Garraway’s, twelve o’clock. Dear Mrs. B.—Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick.’ Gentlemen, what does this mean? ‘Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick!’ Chops! Gracious heavens! and tomato sauce! Gentlemen, is the happiness of a sensitive and confiding female to be trifled away by such shallow artifices as these?

It is for the absurdity of circumstantial evidence and the power of his rhetoric that Serjeant Buzfuz is the Fictional Attorney of the Month.

Fictional Attorney of the Month: Atticus Finch

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Few fictional lawyers are recalled as readily and as fondly as Atticus Finch. It helps that he is the star of both a Pulitzer Price-winning novel, published by Harper Lee in 1960 and assigned to most school children in middle or high school, and of a popular 1962 film adaptation featuring Gregory Peck, who won an Academy Award for his role.

With so much written about his fictional lawyer, it's a challenge to write something novel and valuable. He is perhaps so memorable for his astonishing integrity. Lawyers of integrity, bent upon observance of the rule of law, have a particular mythology about them: consider Thomas More succumbing to the deeds of Henry VIII, John Adams representing soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre, and Robert Jackson prosecuting war criminals at Nuremburg. These, of course, are all real examples. Lawyers in fiction, for some reason, often do not draw artistic depictions of similar scope--or, perhaps, because it is too challenging to do in fiction without feeling forced.

But Atticus Finch rises above "majority rule" in Maycomb County, taking on the defense of a black man who has been accused of raping a white woman. He is deeply empathetic in representing his client. He communicates moral values clearly, and quietly, to his children and those around him, even if he often does not use words. And in anticipation of reading more about him in a second Harper Lee novel this summer, he's the Fictional Attorney of the Month.

Fictional Attorney of the Month: Evangeline Whedon

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Evangeline "Vange" Whedon is an attorney in the Marvel Comics Universe. She was a successful prosecutor until she was discovered to be a mutant--when she comes into contact with blood, she has the power to shapeshift into a red dragon.

After the discovery, she lost her job as a prosecutor and was estranged from her family. She now represents the X-Men in a variety of legal battles (no doubt illustrating the versatility of an ideal legal professional).

In one case, for instance, she helps an anti-mutant terrorist secure a reduced sentence of probation as the X-Men give the terrorist a second change and hire her to work for them. Vange served as in-house counsel for the X-Corporation, a support agency for mutant populations around the world. She also helps with a number of family law disputes to ensure that child mutants whose parents disown them have new legal guardians.  In one critical legal dispute, she ensures that a child mutant in the custody of the X-Men remains in their custody after the child's parents, who had previously given him away, engage in a custody dispute.

Not all attorneys can shapeshift into dragons, but it's this versatility that set her apart. Vange Whedon is this month's Fictional Attorney of the Month.

Fictional Attorney of the Month: Jeff Winger

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Community is not a typical comedy on television. It's probably why its quirky humor attracted a rabid but small audience, why NBC fired its creator three seasons in only to rehire him for the fifth, and why it's now canceled only to survive with some version of a sixth season on Yahoo! Screen in the near future as cast members peel off one by one. But Joel McHale's role as disbarred attorney Jeff Winger is just one of the many delightful roles.

Winger was a successful attorney at Hamish, Hamish & Hamlin, but for all the wrong reasons. He successfully persuades a jury to let off his client facing a DUI charge by tying it to 9/11. He helps a stripper escape tax evasion charges by arguing that her profession is actually not-for-profit performance art.

Unfortunately, a fellow attorney reports him to the bar for failing to obtain an undergraduate degree, and he's stuck in community college to get that degree with the least effort possible. Greendale Community College's eclectic mix of students generally rubs the sophisticated (former) attorney Winger the wrong way--much to the delight of all of us.

2014 Fictional Attorneys of the Month

January: Harvey Dent

February: Philip Banks

March: Willie Stark

April: Charles Kingsfield

May: Bob Loblaw

June: The Man of Law

July: John Shepherd

August: Lionel Hutz

September: Amanda Bonner

October: Sydney Carton

November: Barry Zuckerkorn

2013 Fictional Attorneys of the Month

Fictional Attorney of the Month: Barry Zuckerkorn

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Barry Zuckerkorn is the Bluth family attorney in Arrested Development. Unlike rival attorney Bob Loblaw, he's the original family attorney.

To put it mildly, Mr. Zuckerkorn is deeply incompetent. He never actually passed the California bar, as he hired a lookalike to take it in his place. After a judge lists off pending charges (conspiracy, racketeering, evidence tampering, fraud, theft, grand theft, petty theft), he responds, "Wow, I... I did not get that page." Under the pressures of typical litigation, he lashes out with scare quotes, "That's why I want to settle. I'm not 'super prepared.'" His misunderstanding of law, ranging from spousal privilege (advising his clients that a husband and wife as coconspirators cannot both be charged) to basic ethical obligations (advising his clients to lie to police).

Another exchange illuminates how quickly he's impressed at the legal perception of non-lawyers around him:

Barry: And you don’t want to go in front of that judge. I caught him in a drag club.
G.O.B.: What were you doing there?
Barry: Wow... you should be the lawyer.

There's much more to read about Henry Winkler's portrayal of Barry Zuckerkorn at devoted fansites, but for now, that's all on this month's Fictional Attorney of the Month.

Fictional Attorney of the Month: Sydney Carton

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Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities is perhaps best known among his non-A Christmas Carol works by those who have never read it, simply because of the opening line. But Sydney Carton is one of the great and underappreciated lawyers in all of literature.

He is young and brilliant, shrewd and skilled, filled with self-pity, and he, too, contains a great divide within himself. He seems to hate his client (or at least, is deeply of jealous of him), Charles Darnay, a man who is deeply similar to Carton but a man Carton sees as containing everything he despises.

Through Carton's skill, Darnay is acquitted on treason charges and returns to France, only to find himself arrested once again. It's then that Carton takes Darnay's place at the guillotine and offers one of the great lines of English literature:

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

It is not for his legal skill alone, but also for his sacrifice at the end, that make him the Fictional Attorney of the Month.