“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.
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William H. Rehnquist32
Chief Justice of the United States 1924–2005Related quotes
“Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”
Charles Lamb book Essays of Elia
The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple.
Essays of Elia (1823)
“Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”
Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird
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.”
Douglas William Jerrold (1803–1857) English dramatist and writer
Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Phil Hartman (1948–1998) Canadian American actor, comedian, screenwriter, and graphic artist
On the Simpsons, Lionel Hutz
Charan Singh (1902–1987) prime minister of India
Source: Trysts with Democracy: Political Practice in South Asia, p. 80
“If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.”
Charles Dickens book The Old Curiosity Shop
Source: The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Ch. 56
PZ Myers (1957) American scientist and associate professor of biology
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".
William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Dissenting, DeFunis v. Odegaard, 416 U.S. 342 (1974)
Judicial opinions