Trollope & the law

Features

October 2007

Trollope & the law

On the Victorian novelist and the moral question of defending the guilty.

For the general public, criminal defense exercises all the tabloid fascination of the louche; defending a genuinely guilty client carries the extra frisson of a brush with Old Nick himself. Seated at a dinner party or with a drink in hand, the question a criminal defense attorney inevitably hears from a new acquaintance is “How can you defend someone who is guilty?” In fact, this is really two questions in one: How, consistent with legal and ethical obligations, can you advocate the innocence of someone whom you believe is guilty? And, why would you do so?

Lawyers, of course, have many ways of answering both questions, not all of them self-serving, and in that most humane of novels, Orley Farm, Anthony Trollope, the son of a failed barrister, did justice to most of them, almost despite himself. Indeed, at the heart of the story is the attorney’s most challenging professional dilemma, presenting a full defense ...

Marc Arkin isMarc M. Arkin is a Professor of Law at the Fordham University School of Law. A 1982 graduate of the Yale Law School, Professor Arkin also holds a Ph.D. in American Religious History from the Religious Studies Department of Yale University. She clerked for the Honorable Ralph K. Winter of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and spent several years as a litigator with the law firm of Debevoise and Plimpton before joining the Fordham faculty. She is the author of scholarly articles in areas ranging from nineteenth century American habeas corpus practice to the influence of David Hume on the thought of James Madison, and, most recently, the role of New England regionalism in national affairs during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In addition, Professor Arkin has written on law, religion, and history for a variety of publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, and The New Criterion. At Fordham she teaches, among other courses, civil procedure, mass tort litigation, and conflict of laws.