Over the past few weeks, this blog has become, almost by accident, a small conversation about what it means to practice law.

First, Igor Rayzel wrote about the uncomfortable profession: the role of the lawyer who goes back to the premise after everyone else has settled for the conclusion, who looks for the piece that does not fit, and insists on asking the question others would rather consider closed.

The following week, Mariana dos Santos turned to Clarice Lispector to write about language, creativity and, above all, our ability to see another person. In Mineirinho, Clarice does not offer the reader a legal argument. She does something perhaps more difficult: she changes the place from which we look at someone whom it would be very easy to reduce to the crime attributed to him.

While those pieces were being published, I was immersed in another encounter between law and literature.

On August 20, at the Paraná State Public Library, we launched Advocacia Criminal na Literatura (Criminal Defense in Literature), a book I edited with Professor Diogo Malan. The volume grew out of Advocacia Criminal no Cinema (Criminal Defense in Cinema), published in 2024, and from an observation that seemed quite natural to us: long before lawyers occupied the screen, they had already made themselves at home in books.

Socrates defended himself against his accusers long before courtroom drama became a cinematic genre. Cicero turned legal defense into political confrontation. Shakespeare used trials to explore law, equity, prejudice and power. Dostoevsky understood, perhaps better than almost anyone, the distance that can separate what is proved from what everyone believes they know. Kafka imagined the nightmare of an accusation against which any meaningful defense seems impossible. Harper Lee gave Atticus Finch a symbolic life that has long since outgrown the character himself.

The list could go on for pages.

But after the launch, I found myself thinking that perhaps the more interesting question is not why literature has always been so interested in lawyers.

It is the reverse:

what can literature teach those of us who practice law?

The lawyers we meet in books

The first answer may lie in the characters themselves.

Literature has always been drawn to lawyers because there is something inherently dramatic about the profession. One person speaks for another before someone who has the power to decide that person’s fate. There is conflict, language, strategy, guilt, doubt, money, fear, reputation, freedom. A writer could hardly ask for richer material.

And the portraits are rarely neutral.

There is the heroic lawyer: courageous, independent, eloquent, willing to remain beside someone after everyone else has walked away. These characters often gather, within a few hundred pages, many of the virtues the profession would like to recognize in itself.

Perhaps that is why we are so fond of them.

But literature also knows the vain lawyer, the opportunist, the manipulator, the professional who confuses the client’s interests with his own, the one for whom winning becomes more important than understanding what he is fighting for. There is the lawyer who becomes servile to power, and the one so enamored of his own intelligence that he can no longer see the consequences of his choices.

They are useful to us too.

Literature has the freedom to magnify human traits until we can no longer pretend not to see them. Its good lawyers show us something of what we aspire to be. Its bad ones sometimes reveal, with uncomfortable precision, what we might become.

They are distorted mirrors. Perhaps that is precisely why they reflect so well.

Not every book needs a lawyer

Still, to limit the relationship between law and literature to books about trials and lawyers would be to miss almost everything that makes the relationship interesting.

Shortly before the launch, at Dr. Igor’s suggestion, I read The Old Man and the Sea.

Hemingway did not write a single line about legal practice in that book. Santiago has no clients, enters no courtrooms, makes no arguments. He is simply an old fisherman who, after many days without a catch, decides to go farther out. Much farther.

At last, he finds the great fish.

And he follows it.

There is something deeply seductive in that pursuit. The extraordinary challenge, the opportunity that may never come again, the conviction that one must keep going precisely because what lies ahead is larger than anything one normally encounters.

As I read, I often thought about legal practice.

There are cases that invite us to go farther too. Large cases. Difficult ones. Dangerous ones. Intellectually irresistible cases. The kind of problem that awakens something in a professional who enjoys difficult challenges and who, for that very reason, may begin to believe that every distance deserves to be traveled simply because there is a very large fish waiting at the end of it.

Santiago achieves what seemed impossible.

And that is exactly when another part of the story begins.

I would not pretend that Hemingway wrote a lesson about law firms. Of course he did not. Literature does not work that way. A book also belongs to its reader, and each reader’s experience casts light on different passages.

It was my profession that made me see, in that old man, that boat and that fish, something I recognized.

And perhaps that is exactly the point.

Literature does not need to be about law in order to teach a lawyer something.

Lives we do not have to live

A good book lends us, for a few hours, an experience that is not our own.

We can encounter ambition without surrendering to it. Follow vanity to its final consequences. Understand an obsession from the inside. Experience the fear of someone we would never otherwise meet. Judge a character and, a few pages later, discover that our judgment revealed as much about us as it did about the person on the page.

We can watch mistakes unfold without having to make all of them ourselves.

For a profession like ours, that has a value that is difficult to measure.

We work with people in circumstances that are often exceptional. People who are afraid, cornered, ashamed, furious, proud, wronged, guilty, confused. Sometimes all of those things at once.

Law gives us indispensable categories for dealing with these conflicts. Literature offers a different kind of knowledge. Less orderly, certainly. Less secure. But extraordinarily rich for anyone who spends a professional life trying to understand why people do what they do — and how to tell that story to someone else.

That is part of what Mariana found in Clarice. Mineirinho forces us, if only for a moment, to abandon the comfortable position from which we observe another person at a distance.

Dostoevsky does that constantly. Machado de Assis does too. Shakespeare perhaps more than anyone.

And there is no reason to stop with the classics.

Between Dostoevsky and John Grisham

There is a certain temptation, whenever law and literature are mentioned in the same sentence, to imagine that the conversation must immediately move toward a shelf of great classics, preferably in old editions, accompanied by a repertoire solemn enough to justify the exercise.

I see no reason for that.

Of course, some books have survived for centuries because they continue to say something extraordinary about the human condition. It is difficult to imagine reading Dostoevsky, Kafka or Machado de Assis and emerging entirely unchanged.

But there is also much to learn from John Grisham.

His books understand law firms, clients, professional ambition, negotiation, fear, money, institutional power and the price of choices. They also understand something especially valuable to those of us who work with words: how to tell a story, and how to make someone keep listening.

Popular literature need not apologize for being popular.

Nor does every book we read need to serve as evidence of our erudition.

A lawyer who reads only legal books will probably know more and more law. I am less certain that, at the same pace, he or she will come to know more about the people upon whom the law acts.

So perhaps the best advice is not even “read the classics.”

It is simply: read.

Read great novels. Read short stories. Read plays. Read Brazilian literature. Read the book that won the Nobel Prize and the one you bought at the airport to fill a few hours. Read stories about lawyers and stories that have never come close to a courtroom.

Some will leave nothing behind.

Others will return unexpectedly, years later, when you are facing a case, a client or a difficult choice.

Finding law where law is not

When we put together Advocacia Criminal na Literatura, our first movement was to look for criminal defense in books.

We found a great deal.

We found the heroic defender and the detestable lawyer. The defense of the innocent and the defense of the guilty. The fair trial and the trial that seemed lost before it began. We found in literature something it has always understood about our profession: whoever chooses to stand beside another human being at judgment occupies a very particular place.

Today, it seems to me that the reverse movement may be just as interesting.

After looking for law in literature, perhaps we can begin looking for literature in the practice of law.

In the way we understand a real person who walks into our office. In our caution before a story that fits together a little too perfectly. In our awareness of our own vanity. In choosing the word that allows someone else to see the same situation from a different angle. In knowing that not every great fish has to be followed to the end of the sea.

Literature may not teach us how to draft an appeal, argue before a court or conduct an examination.

It does something else.

It gives us access to lives we have not lived, mistakes we have not yet made, people we would never otherwise know, and points of view we would not naturally choose to occupy.

For anyone who works every day with human conflict, that is already a great deal.

And perhaps that is the most fruitful relationship between criminal defense and literature: to keep searching in books for something that helps us understand the profession — and ourselves within it.

For those who would like to continue the conversation, *Advocacia Criminal na Literatura* is available from Editora Lumen Juris.