Legendary Lawyer Tony Serra Reads From Novel on War and Death Penalty

Begun as an outline when still a young lawyer around 1960 and finally completed in prison when he was a tax resister 50 or so years later, J. Tony Serra’s first novel takes place during World War II in the South Pacific, the story of a court martial, filled with Serra's legal career experiences. The message, if there is a message, is that war is absurd; treason is absurd; the death penalty is absurd--and that platonic love is humanity's only redemption.

A native son of San Francisco, J. Tony Serra has dedicated his life to defending society's outcasts. After earning a Philosophy degree from Stanford University, Serra went on to graduate from UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law in the 60's, an era he calls "the golden age of law."

“I do believe that my mind began to ripen in the 1950s. I was young and naive, and found myself uncomfortably wedged between the beatniks of the 50s and the hippies of the 60s. It turned out for me that I couldn't go back in time and become part of the beatnik milieu; I was too young. On the other hand, I was a little older than the Love Generation, but they accepted me and I strove intellectually and aesthetically in their direction. Also, I recall being victim of many romantic fallacies, one of which was to be a Hemingway image, the expatriate writer. So after graduating from Stanford in epistemology (a philosophy major), I went to Tangiers, Morocco, hopeful to commence a career predicated upon writing bad poetry and bad fiction, prepared to become a never-blossomed flower in the Garden of Literature. ” –From the Prologue, by J. Tony Serra

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