LAWYER QUOTES II
quotations about lawyers
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
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
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
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
Lawyers are seldom loved but often needed.
ROBERT B. MCKAY
introduction, What Lawyers Really Do
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
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
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
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
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
What's the difference between a lawyer and a vulture? The lawyer gets frequent flyer miles.
THOMAS F. SHUBNELL
Greatest Jokes of the Century
Lawyers are natural politicians.
CLARENCE DARROW
remarks at Physicians Club of Chicago, Feb. 16, 1904
Lawyers are men who hire out their words and anger.
ROBERT CHRISTY
Proverbs, Maxims and Phrases
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
He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to Mr. Rogers, Dec. 1833
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
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
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
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
Lawyers and painters can soon change white to black.
HENRY GEORGE BOHN
A Polyglot of Foreign Proverbs