There are many places to turn for compelling, fictional stories that have the law or legal issues at the core. Movies, television and books bring these tales to life.
Many of them challenge our thinking. Many of them provide legal lessons for real life. I had a chance recently to learn more about the story behind a work of fiction that does that – published by West.
Yes, fiction.
Rediscovering Lone Pine is from Andrew F. Popper, a professor at American University, Washington College of Law. West just published the award-winning novel (it won a 2005 Maryland Writers’ Association Prize for Mainstream Fiction).
For Popper, his novel is central to what he says every law student and lawyer needs to develop – the ability to tell a story.
“We all, in the end, are storytellers and we have to decide how to do that succinctly and how we capture our audience and figure out and adjust for the interests of people we represent,” Popper told me. “I think it is the challenge of every lawyer, in fact everybody involved generally in the legal system, to figure out how one goes about telling an effective story.”
So what is Rediscovering Lone Pine about? Well, it tracks childhood friends through their youth, teenage years, law school and into their first years in practice.
The themes involve providing counsel to a close friend and the struggle to maintain independent, professional legal judgment; the competency of a defendant and the Vietnam War veteran experience; and the impact of troubled family situations on children.
But it all begins with the disappearance of a boy in the deep woods of New York.
Are you hooked?
Popper says the book – which includes a discussion guide about the legal and ethical issues it explores – can lead law students to better legal thinking. And that’s how he’s used it in the classroom for learning case theory.
“So much of that class is asking a student, ’Tell me what this case is about.’ That’s the standard question in legal education,” Popper said. “And by getting my students to work within manageable fiction, ‘Tell me what that story was about’ and they can get there pretty easily after awhile. ‘Now tell me what this case is about.’ Because it’s the same thing. It’s the same exercise. It’s not magically something different. It’s exactly the same thing.”
My conversation with Popper is a Westcast podcast, available here or on iTunes (enter “Westcast” in the search box). It runs about 15 minutes.
In addition to Rediscovering Lone Pine, Andy Popper also is the co-author of Popper and McKee’s Administrative Law: A Contemporary Approach from West.
Posted by Kevin Hunt in:
Audio | Education | In Practice |
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