Books: Lawyer’s Hero

FOR THE DEFENSE (624 pp.) — Lloyd Paul Stryker—Doubleday ($5).

When a professionally partisan trial lawyer such as Manhattan’s Lloyd Paul Stryker turns biographer, he also turns defense counsel. His Andrew Johnson was a passionate defense of Lincoln’s maligned successor in which spleen ran as deep as fact. Now in For the Defense he still writes like a lawyer on retainer, but his defense is framed in frank hero worship. The hero: Thomas Erskine, great 18th Century English barrister and Whig Lord Chancellor of England in the reign of George III.

Thomas Erskine, son of the Scottish 10th Earl of Buchan, is still regarded by many legal scholars as the greatest advocate ever to come before a jury. Usually “for the defense,” he pleaded the most historic cases in one of England’s most history-packed periods. For his time, he was the great courtroom defender of English civil liberties.

Come Down, Thomas. The promise Stryker holds out in his prologue is a rich one: “Come down, then, Thomas Erskine, from those pedestals and canvases. Let us see and hear you not only as the eyes of genius knew you, but as your witnesses and judges saw you, and your London juries, whose affections you so often stormed. Let us see you panting in the dust and heat of the arena, see you as the great Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, so often saw you, as your clients . . . and so many others saw you when they listened, spellbound and enthralled, while you were championing not their rights alone, but the rights of all men who possess the priceless heritage of liberty under English law. . . . Burst your marble fetters! Strip off your cerements of oil and canvas!”

Biographer Stryker’s strip job, for all his courtroom ardor, is disappointing. At such length that tedium is the payoff, he uses conventional history to sketch in the political background for Erskine’s cases. Thus he and the reader lose sight of Erskine for pages at a time. The mighty barrister emerges as less a man than a disembodied voice making noble utterances.

Gleeful Lectures. In the end, it is his biographer who has all the fun. Stryker quotes endlessly from Erskine’s speeches, revels in his courtroom technique, lectures the reader gleefully in little asides on the art of pleading. Sample: “[The lawyer] must do the jury’s thinking for them, yet with such tact that they are led to the belief that it is they, and not the advocate, who have unraveled the tangled skein.” Stryker, who once had to ask a prosecutor what he meant by the expression “taking it on the lam,” will find many of his readers in flight long before they finish For the Defense.