Paul Goldstein named winner of 2013 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction

The University of Alabama School of Law and the American Bar Association Journal recently announced that author Paul Goldstein has been awarded the third annual Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction for his novel, “Havana Requiem.”

The other finalists for this year’s Harper Lee Prize included “The Wrong Man” by David Ellis and “Defending Jacob” by William Landay.

First awarded in 2011 to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction is awarded annually “to a published work of fiction that best exemplifies the positive role of lawyers in society and their power to effect change.”

John Grisham’s novel, “The Confession,” received the inaugural Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction in September 2011 and Michael Connelly’s novel, “The Fifth Witness,” received the award in 2012.

The prize, which was initiated three years ago in Tuscaloosa by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, is a way of honoring Lee, a former UA law student, for the “role model she created for the legal professional and for the extraordinary cultural phenomenon that her novel has become.”

“To Kill a Mockingbird,” first published in 1960, is narrated by the young daughter of a small town, Alabama lawyer, who is tasked with defending a black man wrongly accused of assaulting a white woman. Her father, Atticus Finch, is widely regarded as one of the foremost heroes in American literature and as a model of integrity and morality. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and is considered an American literary classic.

A selection committee picks the winning title from the field of finalists, and this year’s committee consisted of six members. The members of the committee were Connelly, Katie Couric, Morris Dees, Vivian Malone Jones, Dr. Sharon Malone and Richard North Patterson.

Goldstein will be presented with the award on Sept. 19 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. In addition to “Havana Requiem,” Goldstein, a professor at Stanford Law School, has written two other novels, “Errors and Omissions” and “A Patent Lie.”

In the end, how many of Goldstein’s books have you had a chance to read? Which did you like or dislike? Which would you recommend and why? Let us know in the comments section below.