Why does the 1924 book Billy Budd top your list? 

It’s Herman Melville and it’s kind of great. It’s a clear classic. It’s a pretty simple tale except for its clear gay subtext, which I think would be pretty obvious to contemporary readers but probably was not to Herman Melville. And it’s about the extraordinary divide that sometimes arises between law and justice. 

How does it explore that best? 

Well, there’s Captain Vere, and vere, of course, translates from the Latin as truth, and I think it’s his last journey. Billy Budd, who’s basically being, in today’s view, homosexually harassed by Claggart, the master-at-arms, strikes Claggart, and of course a seaman cannot strike an officer. And even though the provocation is clear to Vere, Billy is executed. But it absolutely breaks Vere’s spirit, and if I’m recalling – it’s been a while since I’ve read it – he dies with Billy Budd’s name on his lips. 

So from an attorney’s perspective, it’s a great reminder that law and justice don’t always meet? 

I read Billy Budd long before I went to law school; it stands on its own as simply a classic piece of literature about the war between duty and morality. It was the last thing Herman Melville wrote and he hadn’t written any fiction for quite some time. And the other thing that’s always interesting about Melville is he’s always had a noticeable fascination with the law. His father-in-law was Lemuel Shaw who was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts. Melville wrote about the law throughout his career but most famously in Billy Budd. 

I was surprised and not surprised to see To Kill A Mockingbird next on your list. Why does it earn that place? 

It’s still a wonderful read. It’s dated in many ways; it’s extremely sentimental. But it’s beautifully done – you can’t take a thing away from it. 

It was published around 1960 – is its vision of the law much changed from Melville’s time? 

We hope that the law is less crassly unfair to African-Americans. I would love to believe that there’s less injustice to racial minorities – that our consciousness has grown, a consciousness spread in part by books like To Kill A Mockingbird. It’s an interesting segue between literature and the law that a book like that, which was so overwhelmingly popular, also went on to demonstrate why something like the Civil Rights Act needed to be passed. 

Why does the book stick with you and with the country generally? 

It’s kind of a combination of the fact that it’s beautifully done and also incredibly politically correct. It’s the oppressed and innocent African-American, the noble poor person, and the virtuous white guy who’s willing to stand up to the town. 

It’s a story we like to believe. 

It’s a story we like to hear right now, yes. 

Do you see the novel any differently from an attorney’s perspective, perhaps in a way another reader wouldn’t? 

I think Atticus Finch is probably more admirable to lawyers than to other readers, so being a lawyer adds something to that. I often talk about Atticus Finch because people wouldn’t believe any more in a lawyer that good. Lawyers were supposed to be paragons and the reality that they weren’t always that way came with Watergate in the 70s. 

The Just and the Unjust was the only book ever reviewed in the Harvard Law Review – is it standard reading for attorneys? 

No, I don’t think it’s standard reading for anybody any more, which is why I put it on the list. Cozzens was regarded as a major American novelist in the middle of the 20th century, and he has fallen by the wayside in terms of public esteem. But this is just a very, very good book about a small-town lawyer. It’s ultra-realistic, which means that it is from that time when realist novelists believed that their job was to portray only the so-called middle range of experience, which other people might call boring. But it’s a really beautiful book. It’s a beautiful portrait of a time and a place. If anybody really ever wants to know what it was like to be a small-town lawyer in the United States in the 1930s, people whose grandfathers or great-grandfathers were lawyers in a small town and want to know what their life was like, I would say read this book.