"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" - it's a lawyer joke

http://www.spectacle.org/797/finkel.html

by SlyShy • 16 years ago

44 7 16 years ago

grellas• 16 years ago

It is actually pretty amusing to find lawyers claiming that this phrase was intended as a compliment! A very nice piece on its origins.

Dickens, who had his own scars from dealing with the law, said this about their environs:

"These sequestered nooks are the public offices of the legal profession, where writs are issued, judgments signed, declarations filed, and numerous other ingenious machines put in motion for the torture and torment of His Majesty's liege subjects, and the comfort and emolument of the practitioners of the law." (Pickwick Papers)

The unbroken line of criticism over the centuries probably is its own best evidence that there is something seriously broken with our profession - the guild system that renders the services over-priced, the maddening court procedures that just as often work to deny justice as to promote it, the shake-down artists who merely fly the flag of the law while engaging in basic extortion, and on and on.

There is much good in the law, and in many of those who practice it, and it all the sadder therefore that many would pervert that which might otherwise be so well-used.

megablast• 16 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised to see a lawyer or solicitor pull out some quote from Kafka's The Trial, and try to spin that. Just another reason why people do not trust lawyers, on top of the fact that they are the ultimate middle men.

Of course, what you finish with is true, they are very necessary for our current way of life. Of course, they also ensure that they are more and more necessary, as all good middle men do.

nroach• 16 years ago

There would be no lawyers without clients. Where do divorce lawyers get their business? From people who were unable to solve a relationship problem on their own. Where do criminal defense lawyers get their business? From people who chose not to abide by the rules set by the society in which they live. Where do business lawyers get their business? From clients who are unable to resolve a dispute about an agreement they signed.

Sure, it's convenient to blame the intermediary, but at the end of the day if people were better at solving their own problems, the attorney's role would be only that of a counselor. (a role that good attorneys embrace.)

lsb• 16 years ago

Programmers who are able to evaluate their code every second (in a read-eval-print loop) are more productive than programmers who need to compile their code for a minute, and those are vastly more productive than programmers who write their programs on punch cards and evaluate them batched at night.

Lawyers, as far as I've been able to tell, only get to evaluate contracts every time a suit goes to trial, which is, what, every 10 years or so? And if Bill Clinton is right in challenging what "is" is, then any word's meaning can potentially be modified by any ruling.

The problem may be that the evaluation procedure is so much less straightforward than with running code. We got legalese because colloquial English is an even worse way of specifying precise documents, but I'd love to see law documents become computer programs like financial contracts can be. (See http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers... for a particularly elegant example.)

sabj• 16 years ago

Nice piece covering the origins there of the phrase. Lawyer jokes have fallen flat, to me, when they aren't clever... I guess because I know too many lawyers who work for good / not for profit / etc.

kleiba• 16 years ago

Does anyone remember the Marx Brothers? "The party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part." And so on. Pretty much dead-on :)

balding_n_tired• 16 years ago

Next up, why Sandburg's "Tell me why a hearse-horse snickers/Carrying a lawyer's bones." is intended as a compliment.

But no, Shakespeare does not depict Jack Cade as a statesman, is he?

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" - it's a lawyer joke

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