By Marc Galanter

What do you name six hundred attorneys on the backside of the ocean? Marc Galanter calls it a chance to enquire the meanings of a wealthy and primary style of yankee humor: legal professional jokes. Lowering the Bar analyzes hundreds of thousands of jokes from Mark Twain classics to modern anecdotes approximately Dan Quayle, Johnnie Cochran, and Kenneth Starr. Drawing on representations of legislation and attorneys within the mass media, political discourse, and public opinion surveys, Galanter reveals that the expanding reliance on legislations has coexisted uneasily with nervousness in regards to the “legalization” of society. Informative and consistently exciting, his ebook explores the tensions among americans’ deep-seated trust within the legislation and their ambivalence approximately lawyers.

Show description

Read or Download Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture PDF

Similar jurisprudence books

Intention and Causation in Medical Non-Killing: The Impact of Criminal Law Concepts on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

Interpreting the innovations of goal and causation in euthanasia, this well timed new e-book explores a extensive number of disciplines, together with felony and clinical legislations, clinical ethics, philosophy and social coverage and indicates an alternate option to the only presently utilized by the courts, in accordance with grading assorted different types of killing right into a formalized justificatory defence.

The Development of Persistent Criminality

The advance of continual illegal activity addresses essentially the most urgent difficulties of recent criminology: Why do a little members develop into power, power offenders? simply because continual offenders are liable for nearly all of critical crimes devoted, knowing which people becomes power offenders is a crucial step in supporting us improve interventions.

Extra info for Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture

Example text

An everchanging array of jokes is being told and heard, read and thought about, remembered and misremembered, and forgotten. An omniscient observer might mark Introduction  exactly what is being told, by whom, to whom, in what social settings, and what hearers and readers make of it, and so forth. But obviously we have to settle for a rough approximation of this imagined reality. Recorded jokes and oral transmission Some of the jokes presented here are taken directly from the oral tradition and most from published reports of that tradition.

For any given item, it is always possible that the switch took place among tellers in the oral tradition and was merely recorded by these compilers. 130 It should be emphasized that switching is selective rather than indiscriminate. Some attempted switches just don’t “take” and disappear from view; others flourish and may grow more prominent than the original version. But what “takes” is not controlled by the teller or writer; it has to strike a responsive chord in the listeners/readers. So just which items negotiate the transition from their original subjects to new ones tells us something about social perceptions.

Discourse: Lawyers lie incorrigibly. They corrupt discourse by promoting needless complexity, mystifying matters by jargon and formalities, robbing life’s dealings of their moral sense by recasting them in legal abstractions, and offending common sense by casuistry that makes black appear white and vice versa. B. Economic Predators: Lawyers are economic predators; they are greedy, moneydriven monopolists. They charge outrageously high fees, misread social exchanges as professional consultations, shamelessly pad their bills.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.78 of 5 – based on 14 votes