LAWYER QUOTES II

quotations about lawyers

lawyers quote

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

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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

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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

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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

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Lawyers are seldom loved but often needed.

ROBERT B. MCKAY

introduction, What Lawyers Really Do


When lawyers are muddled ordinary people win and lose disputes for no good reason. More accurately, my mistake. In short because of intellectual pigheadedness injustice is done. And that is disgraceful.

PETER BIRKS

The Roman Law of Obligations

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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


Loopholes, technicalities, and procedural irregularities make us think that lawyers are more interested in paper, forms, and procedures than they are in the everyday struggles of human beings. We want counselors, not bureaucrats; we want lawyers who possess legal knowledge but who are not mere legal machines. Clients come to lawyers because they are regarded--or they regard themselves--as problem solvers. But it so often feels as if the problems remain unattended to, or worse, that the lawyer's intervention ends up creating more problems--not putting out smoke, but instead kindling the flames, or starting new fires altogether.

THANE ROSENBAUM

The Myth of Moral Justice


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


Lawyers are men who hire out their words and anger.

ROBERT CHRISTY

Proverbs, Maxims and Phrases


What's the difference between a lawyer and a vulture? The lawyer gets frequent flyer miles.

THOMAS F. SHUBNELL

Greatest Jokes of the Century

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A lawyer's duty is to read the law well himself, then tell the people what it is, and let them act upon it.

BRIGHAM YOUNG

The Journal of Brigham Young, Mar. 7, 1844

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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

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Lawyers are natural politicians.

CLARENCE DARROW

remarks at Physicians Club of Chicago, Feb. 16, 1904


He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.

CHARLES LAMB

letter to Mr. Rogers, Dec. 1833

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In the popular mind lawyers are typically associated with litigation, ie, fights through the courts. For most people litigation in the courts is a traumatic and inordinately costly experience where lawyers are at their most ferocious and partisan. Where the litigation system is abusive and the lawyers unreasonably aggressive, litigation gives lawyers a bad name.

PHILIP WOOD

The Fall of the Priests and the Rise of the Lawyers


We lawyers are always curious, always inquisitive, always picking up odds and ends for our patchwork minds, since there is no knowing when and where they may fit into some corner.

CHARLES DICKENS

Little Dorrit


The most successful trial lawyers are often master storytellers, making their cases come to life for their jurors. The reason is that stories matter ... stories are the deepest and most obvious way that humans organize, communicate, receive, and digest facts.

G. CHRISTOPHER RITTER

Powerful Deliberations


Lawyers and painters can soon change white to black.

HENRY GEORGE BOHN

A Polyglot of Foreign Proverbs


Lawyers are like professional wrestlers. They pretend to get mad and fight, but then they socialize after a trial is over.

ROBERT WHITLOW

The Trial