COURT IS NOW IN SESSION…
ALL OXYGEN-REDUCING BIPEDS PLEASE RISE!
Y’know, some of my best friends are lawyers…
Granted, lawyers get a bad press, and probably worse, in the mass mind, but nobody wrote a song, “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Lawyers.” On the contrary, parents, particularly mothers, want all their offspring to become either doctors or lawyers. (Parenthetically—which is why this digression is set off by parentheses, pardon me for getting technical—parents definitely, don’t let your children grow up to be editors, and not just because the pay is so low!)
Back in the Sixties, when I was struggling with physics and math courses in college, before LBJ and his toady McNamara decided I would look simply smashing in olive drab, the mother of a friend (the friend grew up to be a doctor, btw) advised me I should instead become an attorney because I had “an analytical mind.” Well, that was intended as a compliment, so I didn’t say what flashed into my twisted young brain, which was that was like telling a girl (this was the Sixties, so I thought “girl” without guilt) that because she was beautiful, she should become a member of the oldest profession.
(Hmmm…Might the practice of law be the second oldest profession? But I’m getting too far afield from science fiction…)
Though there are multitudes of far-from-complimentary jokes about lawyers, the legal eagles still don’t show up near the bottom of surveys about which professions the public views with respect. (Journalists are hanging in there near the bottom, and they can’t blame bad press, since they are the press.) And courtroom dramas have long been popular in books, movies, and TV shows. The prime example is probably Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason, star of books, movies, and television—though Mason comes off somewhat differently in the three media—watch one of the Perry Mason movies with Warren Williams in the title role for a shock, if your knowledge of the character is limited to Raymond Burr’s teleportrayal.
The popularity of courtroom dramas also extends to attorneys who are working for the Man, too. In pre-TV days, Mr. District Attorney wowed the radio audience for years. The genre remains popular with shows like Suits and The Grinder, to name just a couple.
Now, science fiction has often shown itself to be capable of cross-breeding, at least in states where it’s legal, with other forms of fiction. It’s an old truism that space opera is often a translation from horse opera, with rocketships and rayguns replacing horses and six-shooters. Similar cross-fertilizations between sf and courtroom drama have frequently been successful. Add in similar joinings with courtroom comedy, and examples of future lawyering played for laughs are included in this book. And while not all sf is set in the future, much is, and it’s a safe bet that lawyers and courtrooms will be with us in the foreseeable future. (Unless the libertarians take over, but that’s not a safe bet, and may even be a contradiction in terms.)
While that subgenre isn’t as much a mainstay of sf as the adventure yarn, the space exploration story, the gadget story, the dystopia or other future society extrapolation (though lawyers might stick their briefcases into any of those categories), etc., there are plenty of such stories, going back to the beginnings of sf magazines.
A story that isn’t on board here, “One Leg Too Many,” one of the Dr. Wentworth stories by W. Alexander, appeared in the October 1929 Amazing Stories. While the primary focus was on organ regeneration, there is a courtroom scene in the tale. George O. Smith’s classic “Venus Equilateral” series in Astounding Science-Fiction in the 1940s, had a corporation lawyer who originally showed up just getting in the way of the no-nonsense engineers, but shortly turned to theft of information in a later yarn, finally becoming an outright space pirate who almost ruined a Christmas party in the bargain. Surely that display of ingenuity and ambition qualified him as an ornament to his profession.
In a less villainous vein, Theodore L. Thomas and Charles L. Harness, both lawyers, though Harness was also a chemist, began a series of stories in the Fifties under the joint pseudonym of “Leonard Lockhard,” which told of a law firm specializing in patent law, a field which, it happens, is much more fantastic than mere extraterrestrial visitors, time travel, parallel worlds, and such. Later installments were written by Thomas alone, still as “Lockhard,” and one memorable case had the firm’s lawyers explaining to their client, one Arthur C. Clarke, why he couldn’t patent the idea of global communications via relay satellites even though he had come up with the idea before anyone else. (Though that story was fiction, the situation was real, and Sir Arthur told his own tale of woe in an essay titled “How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time.”)
I regret that space (the paper sort, not the Final Frontier sort) didn’t permit me to include a Lockhard story. (I also regret that there aren’t enough of the Lockhard stories to make it practical to gather them together in one book.)
Another series detailing the fortunes and misfortunes (mostly the latter) of a future law firm was written by Charles Sheffield, and there is one of those humorous tales included here. They were written by Dr. Sheffield at the request of his children, who wanted stories which involved…but I shouldn’t spoil the setup for you. Go look at the story.
Theodore L. Thomas and Charles L. Harness were not the only lawyers who also wrote sf. One such, who graces this book with her presence, is Laura Montgomery, collaborating with Sarah A. Hoyt. And I should mention another very good writer-lawyer, Joe L. Hensley, and his absence from these pages makes the book poorer (not that it still isn’t a must-buy!). Hensley liked to tell the story of how, when he was serving as Prosecuting Attorney, a somewhat illiterate person wrote him a letter addressed to “Prostituting Attorney,” but obviously didn’t intend the malapropism to be social commentary.
And, of course, David Drake is one of Baen’s most popular authors, with a library full of books to his credit. A graduate of Duke Law School, he was an assistant town attorney for several years, before becoming a versatile and top-selling writer of military sf, just plain sf, and fantasy. David has noted his reason for leaving the law books to gather dust: “They don’t tell you in law school that anybody who talks to a lawyer professionally is either pissed off or miserable, And it gets old.” Sf and fantasy readers should be grateful to those p.o.’d or miserable people who inadvertently led to David’s stellar writing career.
And now for the Dark Side…
Some of the classic writers of sf and fantasy have had a less than rosy view of lawyers and courtrooms. In the first of his celebrated Martian novels, A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ immortal John Carter describes the green, four-armed Martians’ society thus: “In one respect at least the Martians are a happy people; they have no lawyers.” In the previous line, Carter muses that “justice seldom misses fire, but seems rather to rule in inverse ratio to the ascendancy of law,” which reminds me of that quip that “Justice is what we want, but the law is what we get.”
And there’s Robert E. Howard’s “The Queen of the Black Coast,” in which Conan (a barbarian, you might have heard) witnesses a friend commit some forbidden act or other, and is hauled into court and ordered to bear witness against said friend. When the hero demurs, saying he does not wish to testify again a friend, the judge explains to him that the law outranks friendship and it is his duty to testify. At which point the hero narrates, “Seeing that they were all mad, I split his skull, and escaped.”
I don’t have a copy of S. Fowler Wright’s classic sf novel, The World Below handy to provide an exact quote, but I remember being struck by the man of the present (that is, the 1930s) who has traveled millennia into the future amid beings very unlike humans, and explains to one of them that in his (our) time, the government gleefully churned out law after law, until there were too many of them for anyone to keep track of, and it was difficult to cross the street without breaking at least one of them.
But enough of the gripings of classic writers, and time for your much lesser editor to do some of his own griping. At some point in these anthology intros, I inevitably bemoan the absence of stories I would have liked to include, but circumstances would not permit. I’ve already lamented the lack of a story by “Leonard Lockhard.” Another such regrettable absence is “The Witness” by one of my favorite writers, Eric Frank Russell. It would have been oddly up-to-date for a story from the early 1950s, bearing on the present controversy over illegal aliens, (or, as some would have it, “undocumented immigrants”), this time with a really alien alien, and I think it’s a terrific story, even if I suspect that the late Mr. Russell and I would be on opposite sides of the controversy. I’ve tried in the past to include other Russell gems, never with success so far.
I wonder if I could subpoena one of Russell’s stories…?
Excuse me, I think I need to visit the more benevolent sort of bar. See you in court!
—Hank Davis
October 2019