WHY I BECAME A LAWYER (Part One)

Even as a child, I was always deeply troubled by the concept of anyone–certainly including me–being falsely accused of something. I suspect that in this regard I was like most young people.

The summer between my first and second years of high school, I was given a summer reading list. Unlike many of my classmates, I was organized enough to have my parents order the books for me. Further, looking over the books once they arrived at home, I realized that I had better start reading the books on a schedule, otherwise, I’d never read all the books before school started.

Looking back, I remember only two of the books from that summer’s reading list. The Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif told the story of the determined scientists who doggedly pursued and researched the microbes that caused many of the then common medical scourges afflicting the human race. Since I was scheduled to take Biology the next year, I read the book with a good deal of attention, somehow thinking that it would make be do better in Biology. The stories of the scientists were fascinating, but the stories failed to connect with me on an emotional level. The Microbe Hunters is still in print and I recommend it to anyone interested in medical history or biography.

The other book that caught my attention was The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter van Tilburg Clark. Unlike the Microbe Hunters, which was a work of biography, The Ox-Bow Incident was a work of fiction, a cowboy novel at that. As I started reading the novel, I was convinced that someone in my high school’s English Department had either slipped up or was throwing a bone to the less academically minded people in my class, because the novel was a fun, easy read. I assumed that if my teacher’s wanted me to read a book, I was not supposed to enjoy reading it.

I remember that I read it on a gloomy, rainy day. Since the weather was too dark and stormy to swim or play baseball, I read the book from cover to cover in a few hours. My preconceptions about the lightness of the novel were shattered by the ending. Even though I was a month shy of being fifteen, I figured out rapidly that the author wasn’t really writing about cowboys and the Wild West. He was talking about something much deeper. He was talking why we had Law and what can happen if the basic legal procedures that the law follows are ignored. Later in life I learned that these things are called “due process.”

I am not going to say anything else about the book, because I would hate to spoil it for those who either have not read it or have not seen the motion picture of the same name. The Ox-Bow Incident is also still in print and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good read.

I did not recognize it at the time, but my reaction to the book was probably the first sign that I was a lawyer to be.