To celebrate the 50 years since publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, The University of Alabama School of Law and the ABA Journal, “The Lawyer’s Magazine,” will be awarding the First Annual Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. It will be awarded annually to a published book-length work of fiction that best exemplifies the role of lawyers in society, and their power to effect change.
The Prize honors Ms. Lee, a former law student at Alabama, as well as Atticus Finch, the unforgettable character she created, whose steadfast honesty and deep sense of duty to the law have become a standard by which lawyers still measure themselves.
Judging the entries will be novelists Linda Fairstein and David Baldacci, journalist Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and The New Yorker, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and former American Bar Association President, Robert J. Grey, Jr. The public will be invited to vote for their favorite among the finalists on the ABA Journal website.
The Harper Lee Prize will be presented to the winner in conjunction with the Library of Congress 2011 National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.
Books are eligible if they were first published in 2010. The deadline for nominations is April 8, 2011, and there is no entry fee.
More information about the Prize, including the eligibility criteria and entry form, is available at www.HarperLeePrize.org.