Over the past two decades, I’ve worked on fiction between the spaces of my various law related jobs. Law firm associate. Federal judicial clerk. Law professor (which, happily, I still am). My debut novel, Late Bloomers, was recently released by Random House, and I found myself thinking about the lawyers-turned-writers that have inspired me over the years.
During the many years I worked on my own novel, dreaming of publication, I’d always notice if an author mentioned a J.D. degree in their bio, filing it away as inspiration. I’d feel a tiny jolt and think that maybe I, too, could someday join this club of lawyers (or former law students) who had published a book of fiction.
Now that my debut novel has been published, I’m often asked about my law background and why law-trained people are drawn to (and sometimes, quite good at) writing fiction. As I’m not inclined to make generalizations without supporting data (the academic life beats that trait out of you), I can only offer unsupported guesses. And here are a few.
Writers and lawyers pay careful attention to language. If you are a lawyer who drafts contracts, one wrong word or unartful phrase can have real consequences. Fiction writers, too, think hard about the words they choose. If you are a lawyer litigating cases, you likely write briefs and write them in ways designed to generate empathy for your client. Fiction writers, too, are in the empathy business. To empathize with another person, in circumstances different than one’s own, is why many of us write and read fiction.
Also, lawyers are in the constant company of hypotheticals: what if the facts of a case changed this way or that, what outcome then? In law school, professors pepper their students with hypotheticals (sometimes bordering on the bizarre). As a novelist, I’m engaged in a years-long hypothetical exercise; what if my characters did this or that, what then? And then, of course, there is this: The best legal writing can shine a light on inequity and remind us of our shared humanity. Great fiction often does that too.
(As I write these words in May, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in the United States, what comes to mind are the dissenting opinions in Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), rebuking the then Supreme Court majority’s decision to uphold racist orders excluding Japanese Americans from areas of the West Coast and relocating them to internment camps. As Justice Jackson wrote in his famous dissent: “Korematsu was born on our soil…. [He], however, has been convicted of an act not commonly a crime. It consists merely of being present in the state whereof he is a citizen, near the place where was born, and where all his life he has lived.”)
Again, these are just some guesses for why lawyers are drawn to writing fiction. But as I look back on the authors whose work has inspired me over the years, it is hard not to be struck by how many of them were lawyers for a time—or, at least, went to law school, even if they didn’t practice law. Here are nine novels and short story collections by former lawyers or law students that have inspired me along the way.
Read the list here
Legally Literary: A Reading List of Lawyers (or Law Students) Turned Writers
