Word: gideon
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...GIDEON'S TRUMPET, by Anthony Lewis...
...GIDEON'S TRUMPET, by Anthony Lewis. A lively account of Clarence Earl Gideon, the jailhouse lawyer who changed the Jaw of the land, is used to animate a complex subject-the changing philosophy of the U.S. Supreme Court in the last quarter century...
...Court & the Law. From the start, the legal community greeted the book with respect for its deft erudition. Reviewers spotted it as a fascinating account of the case of Clarence Earl Gideon, the obscure Florida convict whose now famous penciled petition to the Supreme Court eventually brought the precedent-shattering decision ruling that any man who cannot pay a lawyer is entitled to court-appointed counsel when on trial, even in state courts, for anything more than a petty offense. This decision brought Gideon a new trial (and his acquittal) and opened the way for new trials for a myriad...
...mind set for some time on a book that would explore both the day-to-day workings of the court and the long-term developments in legal thinking that have made it so important a shaping influence on the U.S. system, particularly in the last decade. The Gideon case was a stroke of luck that Lewis had the journalistic wit to seize on to animate what might otherwise have been a forbiddingly austere exercise in legal citations and abstract discussions. Gideon's dramatic struggle became the vital thread of narrative on which Lewis hangs his account of the inner...
Unlikely Figure. Gideon himself hardly seems at first glance to be the figure of a man of destiny: gaunt, cantankerous, half-educated, a petty gambler and four-times-convicted felon. Yet as one lawyer remarked, "It has become almost axiomatic that the great rights which are secured for all of us by the Bill of Rights are constantly tested and retested in the courts by the people who live in the bottom of society's barrel." Gideon is a classic type of the cussedly independent man. His 22-page letter from jail (Lewis quotes it in full) to Washington...