Literary Lawyers

Daniel Webster: You seem to have an excellent acquaintance with the law, sir. The Devil: Sir, that is no fault of mine. Where I come from, we have always gotten the pick of the Bar.

At many law schools, that bit of dialogue might seem incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial, but at the University of Southern California, it is a part of a regular law-school course, designed "to interest lawyers in literature by appealing to their professional interests."

Idea for the course came from the law school's Dean Orrin Evans, who has long felt that a lot of lawyers are not cultured enough--and that law students needed a breather from their case books. Ten months ago, Professor William Davenport of the university's English department started to compile a bibliography, by now has found more than 200 works by or about lawyers. Among the first items studied by his students: Stephen Vincent Benet's The Devil and Daniel Webster, Willa Gather's Paul's Case. Davenport also gives students a taste of such lawyer-poets as Wallace Stevens and Edgar Lee Masters, exposes them to the theater with Galsworthy's Justice, Elmer Rice's Counsellor-at-Law, and even Gilbert and Sullivan's Trial by Jury ("For today in this arena,/Summoned by a stern subpoena,/Edwin sued by Angelina/Shortly will appear").

For their term papers, students must write book reports, e.g., on Yankee from Olympus (the life of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes), but to improve their table conversation, Professor Davenport also makes them deliver oral reports. By the end of the year, says he, his class should have covered a lot of reading without a single whereas. Among the books on his list: Dreiser's An American Tragedy (murder), Melville's Billy Budd (admiralty law), Trollope's Orley Farm (perjury and forgery), and Dickens' Bleak House--"a wonderful example," says Davenport, "of the slow machinery of the law and how it bankrupts everybody before the trial is over."

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