Author Harper Lee’s estate dropped an appeal challenging an arbitration ruling in a bid to reclaim “To Kill a Mockingbird” stage rights the day before the scheduled oral argument.
The estate was set to argue Friday to the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit that Dramatic Publishing LLC’s win gutted Lee’s statutory right to terminate a 1969 grant of an exclusive license for dramatizations of her 1960 novel for plays in regional and community theaters. In a separate case last month, the Second Circuit rejected the arbiter’s interpretation of termination rights law, through which Lee’s estate reclaimed the right to allow the use of Aaron Sorkin’s Broadway’s script within Dramatic’s “non-first class” market.
Lee had moved to reclaim the rights she signed to Dramatic in 2011, and granted producer Scott Rudin rights notwithstanding those retained by Dramatic in 2015 before her death the next year—months before the termination went into effect. Dramatic took Lee’s estate to arbitration in 2019 and won in 2021. Rudin’s company successfully sued Dramatic in 2022 in a bid to cement its rights to license the script of the 2018 Broadway hit to smaller venues.
The Second Circuit’s Sorkin script ruling found Rudin’s company wasn’t bound by Dramatic’s arbitration win, as it wasn’t a party, paving the way for it to broadly license Sorkin’s script. But its holding on copyright law—backed by the US government—wouldn’t govern the resolution of the dispute between Dramatic and the estate in the Seventh Circuit.
Details on whether and how the Thursday agreement modifies the arbitration ruling weren’t immediately available. The pact prevents the Seventh Circuit from reviewing the findings—which Dramatic argued the court lacked a legal basis to do.
Arbitration, confirmed by the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, found Dramatic’s exclusive worldwide non-first-class rights survived termination under a statutory exception for derivative works. It ordered the estate to pay Dramatic all past and future non-first class royalties received from Rudin’s companies, Sorkin, or any other entity.
It also awarded Dramatic $185,000 over cancellations of plays after legal threats from Rudin’s company and ordered the estate to pay to defend Dramatic if its licensees sued Dramatic to recoup costs from cancellations caused by Rudin’s threats. Dramatic also won nearly $2.6 million in legal fees.
The arbitrator also held that Dramatic has the right to license both its 1969 script and Sorkin’s script to smaller venues and barred the estate from selling non-first-class stage rights to Sorkin or anyone else, though the Second Circuit contradicted those findings as to Rudin.
The Illinois district court, while affirming the award, required the arbitrator to better define “non-first class” rights. The final judgment said they excluded Broadway and West End productions in New York City, and productions anywhere governed by the Actors’ Equity Production Agreement or analogous collective agreement with similar terms and pay scale.
Maxson Mago & Macaulay LLP and TottisLaw represent Dramatic. Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP represents the estate.
The case is Dramatic Publishing Co. v. Estate of Nelle Harper Lee, 7th Cir., No. 23-01309, Joint stipulation 9/4/25.
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