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 a monument dedicated to Atticus in Monroeville marking his existence as the "first commemorative milestone in the state's judicial history". Atticus Finch's willingness to support social outcasts and victims of prejudice is the eponymous inspiration for the name of the Atticus Circle, which is an organization composed of "straight allies" (that is, heterosexual people supportive of the LGBT-rights movement). In 2016, the lawyer Joseph Madison Beck published the memoir "My Father & Atticus Finch", in which he noted the numerous parallels between his father Foster Beck's defense of a black man accused of raping a white woman in the 1938