The summer that I was honorably discharged from the Army, I started law school. My inspiration for attending law school was the character of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. That may sound corny and naïve, but there it is. I wanted to be in a courtroom arguing a righteous point on behalf of some deserving client who was at the mercy of a confusing and relentless legal system. After three years of law school and ten years of practicing as a civil litigator during which I never felt quite like the Atticus Finch I had envisioned, I switched careers. I became a teacher. I was fortunate enough to continue making use of my legal education as I taught Torts and Contracts briefly, and Criminal Law for many years.
During most of the above I also wrote. For many years my writing consisted of book-length fiction with a smattering of non-fiction in the form of blog entries about baseball, a lifelong passion of mine. Then, about three years ago, my writing partner suggested I write a biography of Greg Scarpa, a notorious gangster. At the time, we were crafting spec scripts for a streaming series that includes Scarpa as a primary character. I initially hesitated to accept the challenge of writing the biography. I am not a journalist; I’ve never been a crime reporter; and I’d never written a book-length piece of nonfiction. I eventually relented and started the process of putting the book together.
I initially fell back on some basic research habits I’d gained during my formal education. I read. I took notes. I created a timeline. I put together spread sheets. Etc. During the research process, I began to realize how much I had to rely on my legal education. The bio often veered heavily into the world of legal research and judicial process, something I should have been able to predict. I was often called upon to find and understand case law decisions that were complex from both a procedural and substantive point of view. My research required me to spot legal issues that had either evaded the notice of others or had been misinterpreted, in my view, by them. I also had to dissect and apply the finer points of statutory law on a number of occasions. Not only did I need to understand all of the above to do justice to my subject, I also needed to be able to critique and comment on, in a meaningful way, some salient points of law that turned out to be central to the biography’s narrative.
At some point in this process the utility of my legal training and experience from many years ago became clear to me. I suppose that’s something I should have anticipated at the outset of the project, but, as noted, I didn’t. And frankly, I don’t think I could have done nearly as thorough a job with my subject had I not been able to, time and again, call on my legal education and experience. And it has been more than satisfying to be able to call on those years while tackling an entirely new undertaking.
