“I've often started off with a lawyer joke, a complete caricature of a lawyer who's been nasty, greedy, and unethical. But I've stopped that practice. I gradually realized that the lawyers in the audience didn't think the jokes were funny and the non-lawyers didn't know they were jokes.”
1997 speech at University of Virginia Law School, as quoted in Marc Galanter, Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture (2006), p. 3.
Books, articles, and speeches
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
William H. Rehnquist 32
Chief Justice of the United States 1924–2005Related quotes
“Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”
The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple.
Essays of Elia (1823)
“Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”
Epigraph, quoting Charles Lamb
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
“Self-defense is the clearest of all laws; and for this reason - the lawyers didn't make it.”
Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
On the Simpsons, Lionel Hutz
Source: Trysts with Democracy: Political Practice in South Asia, p. 80
“If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.”
Source: The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Ch. 56
at Council for Secular Humanism, October 9, 2010.
Context: I have been told that my position won't win the creationist court cases. Do you think I care? I didn't become a scientist because I want to impress lawyers. The word for people who are neutral about truth is "liars".
Dissenting, DeFunis v. Odegaard, 416 U.S. 342 (1974)
Judicial opinions