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Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.
JEREMY BENTHAM, The Canadian Bar Journal, Jun. 1966
If there were no bad people there would be no good lawyers.
CHARLES DICKENS, The Old Curiosity Shop
How lawyers make work for one another! You're all priests, worshipping the same god. No wonder you adore one another.
JOYCE CAROL OATES, The Falls
Lawyers have a way of seeing that sets them apart from the rest of us. In some way this special vision makes them invaluable, and in other ways, repulsive. Lawyers are much more focused on rational, logical, and objective criteria to the exclusion of the emotional, subjective, and sometimes irrational reponses to the world. Moreover, lawyers like to show no emotion, and possess a particular disdain for the emotions that are found in others, which has the quality of making them seem inhuman.
THANE ROSENBAUM, The Myth of Moral Justice
- I know you lawyers can with ease,
- Twist words and meanings as you please;
- That language, by your skill made pliant,
- Will bend to favour every client;
- That 'tis the fee directs the sense,
- To make out either side's pretense.
JOHN GAY, "The Dog and the Fox"
Lawyers rarely test their power, or the power they promote, against this simple pragmatic question: "Will it do good?" When challenged about the expanding reach of the law, the lawyer answers, "Why not?"
LAWRENCE LESSIG, Free Culture
Lawyers are necessary in a community. Some of you ... take a different view; but as I am a member of that legal profession, or was at one time, and have only lost standing in it to become a politician, I still retain the pride of the profession. And I still insist that it is the law and the lawyer that make popular government under a written constitution and written statutes possible.
WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT, speech, Nov. 4, 1909
At the most pragmatic level, lawyers are society's professional problem solvers. Lawyers are called upon to make distinctions, to explain how and why cases or experiences are alike or different. Lawyers are expected to restore equilibrium, to be balancers. Every discipline, every profession, every job, and every calling has a cutting edge. At that cutting edge, lines are drawn. Lawyers and judges are society's ultimate line drawers. On one side of the line, the conduct, action, or inaction is proper; on the other side of the line, it is not.
RENNARD STRICKLAND & FRANK T. READ, The Lawyer Myth
Lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, and to the aristocracy by habit and taste; they may be looked upon as the connecting link of the two great classes of society.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America
Honest and peace-loving people shun the Courts and are prepared to suffer loss rather than fall into a Lawyer's clutches.
PETER DE NORONHA, The Pageant of Life
People are getting smarter nowadays; they are letting lawyers, instead of their conscience, be their guide.
WILL ROGERS, "Helping the Girls with Their Income Taxes," The Illiterate Digest
If lawyers were to undertake no causes till they were sure they were just, a man might be precluded altogether from a trial of his claim, though, were it judicially examined, it might be found a very just claim.
SAMUEL JOHNSON, Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, Aug. 15, 1773
It is the lawyers who run our civilization for us -- our governments, our business, our private lives. Most legislators are lawyers; they make our laws. Most presidents, governors, commissioners, along with their advisers and brain-trusters are lawyers; they administer our laws. All the judges are lawyers; they interpret and enforce our laws. There is no separation of powers where the lawyers are concerned. There is only a concentration of all government power -- in the lawyers.
FRED RODELL, Woe Unto You, Lawyers
[The Utopians] have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters and to wrest the laws, and, therefore, they think it is much better that every man should plead his own cause, and trust it to the judge, as in other places the client trusts it to a counsellor; by this means they both cut off many delays and find out truth more certainly; for after the parties have laid open the merits of the cause, without those artifices which lawyers are apt to suggest, the judge examines the whole matter, and supports the simplicity of such well-meaning persons, whom otherwise crafty men would be sure to run down; and thus they avoid those evils which appear very remarkably among all those nations that labour under a vast load of laws.
There is never a deed so foul that something couldn’t be said for the guy; that’s why there are lawyers.
MELVIN BELLI, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 18, 1981
Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered.
There is a vague popular belief that lawyers are necessarily dishonest. I say vague, because when we consider to what extent confidence and honors are reposed in and conferred upon lawyers by the people, it appears improbable that their impression of dishonesty is very distinct and vivid. Yet the impression is common, almost universal. Let no young man choosing the law for a calling for a moment yield to the popular belief. Resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation, rather than one in the choosing of which you do, in advance, consent to be a knave.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, memorandum for law lecture, 1850
Lawyers are merchants of misery.
NANCY LEVIT & DOUGLAS O. LINDER, The Happy Lawyer
Law is an imperfect profession in which success can rarely be achieved without some sacrifice of principle. Thus all practicing lawyers -- and most others in the profession -- will necessarily be imperfect, especially in the eyes of young idealists. There is no perfect justice, just as there is no absolute in ethics. But there is perfect injustice, and we know it when we see it.
ALAN DERSHOWITZ, Letters to a Young Lawyer
Beware of lawyers and consultants and people who do not take risks and who do not get their hands dirty.
FELIX G. ROHATYN, speech, May 1982
Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.
DOROTHY L. SAYERS, Clouds of Witness
Lawyers are operators of toll bridges which anyone in search of justice must pass.
JANE BRYANT QUINN, attributed, The Lawyer Myth
A countryman between 2 Lawyers, is like a fish between two cats.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1737
I do not believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground, and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide trivial cases.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU, "A Plea for Captain John Brown"
The question arises ... whether all lawyers are the same. This is like asking whether everything that gets into a sewer is garbage.
FLORYNCE R. KENNEDY, Color Me Flo
We don't operate a system that guarantees a trial lawyer will really know what he or she is doing before handling a trial. Qualify as an attorney and you immediately have the right to screw up somebody's case in court. We lawyers have been left with a huge field in which to demonstrate our incompetence.
KEITH EVANS, Common Sense Rules of Advocacy for Lawyers
Lawyers are like rhinoceroses: thick skinned, short-sighted, and always ready to charge.
DAVID MELLOR, "Question Time," Dec. 3, 1992, BBC1
The Lawyers' trade is a trade built entirely on words. And so long as the lawyers carefully keep to themselves the key to what those words mean, the only way the average man can find out what is going on is to become a lawyer, or at least to study law, himself. All of which makes it very nice -- and very secure -- for the lawyers.
FRED RODELL, Woe Unto You, Lawyers
There is not a more fatal error to young lawyers than relying too much on speechmaking. If any one, upon his rare powers of speaking, shall claim an exemption from the drudgery of the law, his case is a failure in advance.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, notes for a lecture, Jul. 1, 1850
Where there's a will, there's a lawyer.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES, Poems and Paragraphs
Lawyers are like rhinoceroses: thick-skinned, short-sighted, and always ready to charge.
DAVID MELLOR, "Question Time," BBC Television, Dec. 3, 1992
Another striking feature of trials at law is the apparent equality of the contest. An unsophisticated observer would suppose that as one side must be right and the other must be wrong, it would clearly and speedily appear which is right and which is wrong. But two skillful lawyers are like two experts at any game of skill or endurance, and the result is that the clearest case becomes at least somewhat doubtful, and the event quite problematical. The arguments on both sides seem irrefragable as they are separately presented. The advocates elude one another's grasp like weasels. They are lubricated all over with the oil of sophistry and rhetoric. It is quite as difficult to put forward a suggestion that is not plausibly answered, as it is to make a run at baseball, or a count at billiards after a skillful player has left the balls in a safe position.
Albany Law Journal, Oct. 1, 1870
The only secret that the lawyer really possesses about the law is that no one can ever be certain of what the law is.... The lawyer is accustomed to the ways of bending and changing rules to suit his (or his client's) purposes, to dance in the shadows of the law's ambiguities. Rules hold no particular terror for the lawyer, just as the sight of blood holds no terror for the surgeon. Because he operates a system of rules, the lawyer becomes indifferent to them in the way that a doctor becomes indifferent to the humanity of the body that is lying on the operating table.
JETHRO LIEBERMAN, Crisis at the Bar
If you cannot avoid a quarrel with a blackguard, let your lawyer manage it, rather than yourself. No man sweeps his own chimney, but employs a chimney-sweeper, who has no objection to dirty work, because it is his trade.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
Lawyers are the foot soldiers of our Constitution.
RENNARD STRICKLAND & FRANK T. READ, The Lawyer Myth
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