The Catholic University of America


A. G. Harmon
Clinical Assistant Professor
Lawyering Skills Program

harmon@law.edu 

A.G. Harmon received his J.D. from The University of Tennessee, his M.A. from The University of New Hampshire, and his Ph.D. in English from The Catholic University of America. He practiced at Dearborn and Ewing Attorneys in Nashville, Tennessee.

In addition to legal writing, he has taught classes in Jurisprudence, Law and Literature, Advanced Legal Research and Writing, Law Journal Writing, and Law Journal Editing, and the plays of Shakespeare.

A nominee for The Pushcart Prize in the essay, he was a 1998-1999 Richard Weaver Graduate Fellow, winner of the 1995 Glen Writers Fellowship, received the 1994 Milton Center Postgraduate Writing Fellowship, and was a Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference in 2003. His novel, A House All Stilled (The University of Tennessee Press 2002), was awarded The Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel in 2002, and was nominated for the Virginia Literary Prize and the Pen-Hemingway Award. His novel Fortnight, was the runner-up for The William Faulkner Prize for the Novel in 2007. A book on the law in Shakespeare-Eternal Bonds, True Contracts: Law and Nature in Shakespeare's Problem Plays--was published by State University of New York Press in 2004.

HONORS

2007 Honoree: Writer’s Series University of Evansville, Evansville Indiana

2007 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for the Novel, Runner-up: Fortnight

2005 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for the Novel, Runner-up: A Lifetime Burning

2005 Tobias Wolff Short Fiction Award, Runner-up, “What They Left”

2004 Fan Mayall Gates Reading, Seattle Pacific University: Honoree

Pen-Bingham Fellowship for Writers, 2004: Nominee

The Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, 2001: A House All Stilled

Pen-Hemingway Award for the Novel, 2003: Nominee

Sewanee Writers’ Conference: 2003 Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Fiction

The Pushcart Prize: Nominee, 1999, 2000, 2003

The Richard Weaver Fellowship: 1998-1999

The Milton Center Fellowship for the Novel-in-Progress: 1994

The Thomas Williams Short Story Award: 1993

Virginia Literary Prize, 2003: Nominee

PUBLICATIONS AND PAPERS

“Defamation in Good Faith: An Argument for Restating the Defense of Qualified Privilege,” forthcoming 2011, Barry Law Review.

The Complete Advocate, LexisNexis Publications 2010.

“Lawyering Outside Lawsuits ? Incorporating Negotiations, Settlements, and Mediations into the Legal Writing Curriculum, “Perspectives, West, forthcoming 2010, with Olivia Farrar, Ph.D.

“Perfect Silence,” short story, The Antioch Review, Vol. 68, No. 2, 2010.

“In Nomine,” essay, Image, No. 66, Summer 2010.

“Weighing Medical Judgments: Explaining Evidentiary Preferences for Treating Physician Opinions in ERISA Cases after Black & Decker Disability Plan v. Nord, law review article, forthcoming Michigan State University Journal of Law and Medicine, co-written with Roy F. Harmon, III.

“Portraits of the Sonata: Desire and Transformation in Modern European Cinema,” essay, Image, No. 61, Spring 2009.

“Native Language,” short story, The Antioch Review, Vol. 66, No. 3, Summer 2008.

“The Mass of Virtue,” essay, Image, No. 58, Spring 2008.

Review of Niall Williams’ John, Commonweal, Spring 2008.

“A Thing of Beauty,” short story, Triquarterly, Issue 129, Winter 2008.

“‘Knights of the Border Land’: Errantry in Fiction of the American Frontier”
(paper presented at Southern Association of Law Schools Conference, Summer 2008).

“‘Back From Wonderland: A Linguistic Approach to Duties Arising from Threats of Physical Violence”; forthcoming Capital University Law Review, Fall 2008.

“In the Deepest Dark,” Commonweal, Summer 2008.

“Blood Conscience: Tensions between Moral and Legal Culpability in the stories of Andre Dubus,” (paper presented at Southern Association of Law Schools Conference, Summer 2007).

“’Slender Knowledge’: Sovereignty, Madness, and the Self in Shakespeare’s King Lear,” Journal of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, vol. 4, No. 3, 2008.

“Still Life and Matisse,” Commonweal, February 23, 2007, Volume CXXXIV, Number 4.  

“The Law in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night,” paper presented at symposium on “American Exceptionalism: Law and Literature,” Oxford University, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, England, January, 2006.

“On Seeing,” Commonweal, April 7, 2006, Volume CXXXIII, Number 7.  

“Lawful Deeds: The Entitlements of Marriage in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well,” selected for reprint in Shakespearean Criticism (1960-present day), Thompson Gale Publishers, 2006.

“Doubting Thomas,” Commonweal, January 27, 2006, Vol. CXXXIII, Number 2.

“Current Literature,” Commonweal, June 17, 2005, Vol. CXXXII, Number 12.

“What They Left,” short story, The Bellingham Review, Volume XXIX, 57:1, Spring 2006.

Eternal Bonds, True Contracts: Law and Nature in Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, State University of New York Press, 2004.

“Gilead,” Image, vol. 45 (spring 2005).

“Shakespeare’s Carved Saints,” Studies in English Literature (Spring 2005).

“Raising the Near Dead,” in Books and Culture, July/August 2004.

“Sacrifice in the Public Square: Ciceronian Rhetoric in More’s Utopia and the Ultimate Ends of Counsel,” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature (Fall/Winter 2003).

“Shakespeare and the Law of the Renaissance,” paper presented to Thomas More Society of America, May 2003.

A House All Stilled, a novel, winner of The Peter Taylor Prize, University of Tennessee Press, 2002

Novel Excerpt: From A House all Stilled, Crux: A Literary Journal, 2003.

“Of Time and Form: The Art of William Christenberry,” Image, 2002.

“Lawful Deeds: The Entitlements of Marriage in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well,” Logos, Fall/Winter 2001.

“‘A Pair of Carved Saints’: Shakespeare’s Richard II and Thomas A’Becket,” Shakespeare and the History Play, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, England, 2002.

“The Ignatian Exercises,” story presented at Contemporary Literature Conference, Seattle Pacific
University, October 2000.

“Ordered Chaos: Three Films by Paul Thomas Anderson,” Image, Fall 2000.

“Faith and Doubt in Contemporary Southern Literature,” Symposium Presenter, Millsaps College, November 1999.

“Fiction at the End of the Century,” Image, Spring 1999.

Interview with Pulitzer Prize Winner Oscar Hijuelos, Image, Spring 1999.

“The Case of Edith Stein” in Things in Heaven and Earth, ed. H. Fickett, Paraclete Press, 1998.

“Concepts of Justice in Shakespeare's Problem Plays,” College English Association-MAG Spring
1997 Conference .

Review of Shusaku Endo's Deep River, Image, Fall 1996.

Interview with novelist Doris Betts, Image, Summer 1995.

“Eyes to See,” Image, Winter 1995.