Perry Mason and the art of Advocacy in the Saturday Law Interview

What I remember most fondly about my grandfather is my gentle occasional tuggings of his white beard sat on lap as he would tell me Tarzan stories. He never ran out of stories. One day I grew up and the necessity of homework took me away from his Tarzan. He also loved Perry Mason. I was too young during the sat on his lap days for Erle Stanley Gardner. A few years later when grandfather lived even further away from us, as I watched episodes of Perry Mason on TV, my father would recount how his father loved these very tales when my father was growing up.

I saw a lot of books in that extended bookshelf behind the sofa in my grandparents' living room. Gardner would have resided there with copies of the Reader's Digest, complete works of Shakespeare, Dickens, a whole lot of English poetry and classics. My Grandfather was a graduate of English Literature and Persian from Calcutta University in India. I never read Gardner in print and it was only today that I found out how Erle was spelt. Erle left law school only after a month and became a self-taught attorney after passing the California bar exam in 1911. That was the year my grandfather was born. Erle Stanley Gardner was a lawyer for a few years but I think the world knew him better as the inimitable creator of Perry Mason.

For the generation before me, Mason had left a deep imprint on the American law student's psyche. In this side of the Atlantic we had Rumpole. Popular culture is so fond of the courtroom drama that somewhere along the line every single practising lawyer would have been influenced by some fictitious lawyer. Yet the reality of advocacy is so very different from the made up characters, however realistic the renditions might be. 'Advocacy is an art and there is nothing better than an effective cross examination or giving a well prepared closing speech whether the case involves domestic rape, gangland shooting or international fraud', said Barrister Felicity Gerry in her recent conversation with me. Read all about it as they say: 

The Art of Advocacy: A Barrister's Tale
In conversation with Barrister Felicity Gerry



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