Lowering the Bar : Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture

by Galanter, Marc

• ISBN13: 9780299213503
• ISBN10: 0299213501
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-09-15
• Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Summary

What do you call 600 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? Marc Galanter calls it an opportunity to investigate the meanings of a rich and time-honored genre of American humor: lawyer jokes.Lowering the Baranalyzes hundreds of jokes from Mark Twain classics to contemporary anecdotes about Dan Quayle, Johnnie Cochran, and Kenneth Starr. Drawing on representations of law and lawyers in the mass media, political discourse, and public opinion surveys, Galanter finds that the increasing reliance on law has coexisted uneasily with anxiety about the "legalization" of society. Informative and always entertaining, his book explores the tensions between Americans' deep-seated belief in the law and their ambivalence about lawyers.

Author Biography

Marc Galanter is the John and Rylla Bosshard Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Centennial Professor in the Department of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	xiii
Acknowledgments	xv
Introduction	3	(6)
The Enlargement and Withdrawal of the Legal World	9	(6)
Learning from Lawyer Jokes	15	(16)
PART ONE: The Enduring Core and Its Recent Accretions
Lies and Stratagems: The Corruption of Discourse	31	(33)
Lying and Dishonesty	31	(5)
Workers in the Mills of Deceit	36	(4)
Eloquence, Persuasiveness, Resourcefulness	40	(7)
Hot Air: Lawyer Talk as Fakery and Bombast	47	(3)
Masters of Stratagem	50	(5)
The Lawyer Outsmarted	55	(6)
The Ascendency of Lawyer Talk	61	(3)
The Lawyer as Economic Predator	64	(33)
Only the Lawyer Wins	64	(2)
Taking It All	66	(4)
A Prodigious Predator	70	(6)
Fee Simple	76	(4)
Throwing the Meter	80	(6)
Sexploitation: Predation as Sex / Sex as Predation	86	(8)
The Justice Tariff	94	(3)
Playmates of the Devil	97	(17)
The Devil's Own	97	(4)
Headed for Hell	101	(4)
Absent in Heaven	105	(3)
A Kingdom of This World	108	(6)
Conflict: Lawyers as Fomenters of Strife	114	(28)
Excess and Insufficient Combativeness	114	(4)
Promoters of Conflict	118	(2)
The Conniving Claimant	120	(10)
Litigation Fever	130	(8)
The Lawyer as Heroic Champion	138	(4)
The Demography of the World of Lawyer Jokes	142	(15)
The Hemispheric Prism	142	(2)
Women in Combat	144	(4)
Jews and Other Outsiders	148	(4)
Seniors and Juniors	152	(5)
PART TWO: The New Territories
Betrayers of Trust	157	(22)
Lawyers in a World of Declining Trust	157	(3)
The Betrayal Joke Cluster	160	(6)
Betrayal as Virtue	166	(5)
What Do the Jokes Tell Us?	171	(6)
An Excess of Loyalty?	177	(2)
The Lawyer as Morally Deficient	179	(17)
A Suspect Profession	179	(5)
Looking Out for Number One	184	(2)
No Redeeming Social Value	186	(4)
``He Just Doesn't Get It''	190	(2)
In the Laboratory	192	(4)
Lawyers as Objects of Scorn	196	(14)
Closing the Circle of Scorn	196	(3)
Sounding the Depths	199	(3)
Into the Slime	202	(2)
The Anal Connection	204	(3)
The Uses of Scorn	207	(3)
``A Good Start!'' Death Wish Jokes	210	(23)
Prehistory	210	(3)
The Contemporary Onslaught	213	(2)
Let's Kill All the Lawyers	215	(4)
A Pestilential Affliction	219	(4)
The 70 Percent Legend	223	(3)
Why Death Wish Jokes Flourish	226	(7)
PART THREE: The Justice Implosion
Enemies of Justice	233	(16)
Doing Justice	233	(3)
The Lawyer as Enemy of Justice	236	(4)
What Does Law Deliver?	240	(9)
Only in America?	249	(14)
Appendix: Register of Jokes	263	(12)
Notes	275	(82)
References	357	(56)
Index	413