Acclaimed novelist Carroll Dale Short turns his talents toward creative nonfiction in The People's Lawyer, the biography of local personality and national figure Julian McPhillips Jr.—a man as paradoxical as the South in which he lives. The story follows McPhillips's journey from his childhood in tranquil Cullman, Alabama, to his athletic career and studies at Princeton, and on to an activist era at Columbia Law School. Recounting the one-time assistant attorney general's path toward being one of the leading Alabama trial attorneys, Short reveals a man driven by his beliefs and his finely etched sense of justice and morality. Along the way, amidst McPhillips's police brutality cases and continued legal battles with Alabama governors, Short delves into the life, personality, and habits of McPhillips—a life involving local and national politics, church trials, sexual harassment cases, faith healers, and family, all against the continually evolving backdrop of the body politic of Montgomery.

As a fellow attorney put it, Julian is one of the few lawyers "who could represent Che Guevara one day and William Buckley the next."