Miscellaneous

Blawg Book Highlighter #32: Legal Fictions: Short Stories About Lawyers and the Law

By Bill Gratsch

Blawg Book Highlighter #32: Legal Fictions: Short Stories About Lawyers and the Law

I find it curious that with all of the lawyer-authors out there, the well-known ? Scott Turow, John Grisham, Lisa Scottoline, David Baldacci, and the lesser-known ? Randall Hicks, David Ellis, Laura Caldwell, myself, to name just a few ? why there aren't more anthologies or compilations of their works.

It seems like such a natural. As a lawyer-writer friend of mine commented recently, there's not even a "Chicken Soup for the Lawyer's Soul."  (Full disclosure: two of my stories are in the just-released and just-in-time-for-Father's Day "Chicken Soup for the Father and Son Soul.")

I've searched and searched on Amazon and just can't find such a beast, at least not a living one. One Amazon user, Richard L. Pangburn, of Bardstown, Kentucky (the self-proclaimed "Bourbon Capital of the World), did attempt to collect all of the collections on the law and lawyers in a Listmania list titled "Lawyer talk: the most eloquent?and the funniest." On it, you'll find titles like: "Law in Literature: An Annotated Bibliography of Law-Related Works," "Lawyer's Wit and Wisdom: Quotations on the Legal Profession, in Brief," "The Judicial Humorist: A Collection of Judicial Opinions and Other Frivolities," and "The Lawyer Who Blew Up His Desk: and Other Tales of Legal Madness."

What most of the books on Pangburn's list share in common, other than their lawyerly tales, is that they fall into the hard-to-find or out-of-print category. You'd have to shell out $49 for a used copy of "Law in Literature" and nearly $40 for "The Judicial Humorist." Good news: You can get "The Lawyer Who Blew Up His Desk" for as little as a penny.

With all of the lawyer-authors out there selling lots and lots of books, you'd think that a publisher out there would think of putting them together.  But most of the lawyerly collections that I've been able to find were written a decade or more ago.

Take, or example, "Legal Fictions: Short Stories About Lawyers and the Law," edited by Jay Wishengrad It was published in 1994 and featured stories by the likes of Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, Thomas Wolfe and Graham Greene, some of the greatest writers of all time, as well as some lesser knowns.

You won't find pieces by Turow, Grisham, Scottoline, Baldacci, Hicks, Ellis, Caldwell or myself in there. But wouldn't it be cool if such a contemporary collection did exist?

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Randy Richardson is an author, humorist, former journalist, and a lawyer. His fiction debut, Lost in the Ivy, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of Chicago's storied Wrigley Field, won the Writers Marketing Association's ?Fresh Voices? Book Award and the Illinois Woman's Press Association's Mate E. Palmer Communications Contest. He writes the Dad Libs column for SanityCentral.com and is a frequent contributor to Chicago Parent magazine. In his day job, he is an attorney for the Social Security Administration?s disability appeals branch. At night and during lunch breaks, he serves as president of the Chicago Writers Association (chicagowrites.org) and works on his second novel while a 4-year-old tugs on his legs. Visit his website at www.lostintheivy.com.

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Full post as published by Blawgs Blog by Bill Gratsch on June 16, 2008 (boomark / email).