Atticus Finch literary journals". Alice Petry remarked, "Atticus has become something of a folk hero in legal circles and is treated almost as if he were an actual person". Examples of Atticus Finch's impact on the legal profession are plentiful. Richard Matsch, the federal judge who presided over the Timothy McVeigh trial, counts Atticus as a major judicial influence. One law professor at the University of Notre Dame stated that the most influential textbook from which he taught was "To Kill a Mockingbird", and an article in the "Michigan Law Review" asserts, "No real-life lawyer has done more for the self-image or
Atticus Finch 100 Best Characters in Fiction Since 1900" names Finch as the seventh best fictional character of 20th-century literature. In 2003 the American Film Institute voted Atticus Finch, as portrayed in an Academy Award-winning performance by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film adaptation, as the greatest hero of all American cinema. In the 2018 Broadway stage play adapted by Aaron Sorkin, Finch is portrayed by Jeff Daniels. Claudia Durst Johnson has commented about critiques of the novel, saying, "A greater volume of critical readings has been amassed by two legal scholars in law journals than by all the literary scholars in