Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’
With a name like Atticus Finch is it really a surprise that you wind up going to law school? That’s right, there’s a real 1L at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin, named Atticus Finch after the iconic character in Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill A Mockingbird.
And while it may seem like an appropriate name since Atticus’s parents, Matthew and Ian Finch, are both lawyers, this really isn’t a case of fathers pre-determining their son’s career. See, as reported by Texas Lawyer, Matthew and Ian gave their son the name Angus at birth, but after reading Mockingbird at the tender age of 7 he was inspired to change his name.
Now the fictional Atticus is certainly inspirational, but that wasn’t the only motivating factor behind the name change. As a child the real-life Atticus had recently moved right around the time McDonalds started marketing its Angus beef burger. As he says, “It wasn’t a good time to be a kid changing schools with a name of Angus in Texas.”
So at 8 years old, and after using the name Atticus for about a year beforehand, his parents assisted him in getting his name legally changed;
“I used Atticus as much as I could. Even though my parents did all of the legal work, I had to show up in court and explain to the judge [that] I wasn’t running from the law,” Finch recalls of that court hearing when he was a child.
Finch said the fictional Atticus Finch inspired him, because of the respect the character commanded in the book and movie, and his dedication to justice. It also helped that both of Finch’s parents were lawyers, he said.
Atticus doesn’t regret the name change, but the somewhat unusual moniker didn’t stop kids from ridiculing his name. But now that he’s in law school he says, “The jokes definitely got better.”
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).