A colleague asked me how many lawyer jokes there are. I told him just three ? the rest are documented case histories. |
For elites, there is this hostility toward lawyers because they see lawyers as sort of attacking them ... but at the same time, for the larger population, there is a kind of disappointment with law. There was a sense that lawyers were going to bring remedies and justice -- and (they don't), so everybody ends up having a grievance about lawyers, |
For elites, there is this hostility toward lawyers because they see lawyers as sort of attacking them ... but at the same time, for the larger population, there is a kind of disappointment with law. There was a sense that lawyers were going to bring remedies and justice -- and (they don't), so everybody ends up having a grievance about lawyers. |
I don't look to jokes as a balanced look at life. But they can be an indicator. Jokes work on shared and collective perceptions among people. |
In the public imagery, jury trials are very emblematic to people of what the law is. |
Lawyers in the United States have a central role, a visibility and prominence that doesn't exist anywhere else. |
The smaller the jury, the more variance you get just from the play of the numbers. |
We have 500-year-old lawyer jokes still in circulation and most of them go back at least 100 years. But around the 1980s, there was a great shift. They became much more hostile. |
You can learn from them, you can see what is bothering people. ... The jokes are a screen on which people project their feelings about lawyers and the law. |