Taking Lawyer Jokes Seriously

These are tough times for the legal profession (and how many times has that been said before?). Enron, Arthur Anderson, KPMG, the "Torture Memo"--spectacular instances of greed and/or immorality, all facilitated or perpetuated by lawyers. But anyone who asserts that the public view of lawyers has worsened in recent decades owing to these and other events (Watergate, Savings and Loan debacle, etc.) will likely be reminded that anti-lawyer sentiment is timeless.

Did you hear about the post office having to cancel its commemorative issue honoring lawyers? It seems that it was too confusing--people didn't know which side of the stamp to spit on.

In his new book, Lowering the Bar, reviewed here, Marc Galanter, one of the preeminent scholars of the legal profession, has come up with a novel way to get at this question: he collected every lawyer joke he could find, going back several centuries, and drew connections between patterns of lawyer jokes and changing public attitudes towards lawyers. For example, the above joke was initially told of Hitler and Stalin, and only later of lawyers. (Ouch!).

Galanter found that the quantity and nastiness of lawyer jokes has exploded since about 1980, and offers an analysis of why. This is a fascinating study (with a bunch of funny lawyer jokes).