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Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture

by Marc Galanter

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
eISBN: 978-0-299-21353-4 | Paper: 978-0-299-21354-1 | Cloth: 978-0-299-21350-3
Library of Congress Classification K184.G35 2005
Dewey Decimal Classification 340.0207

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK

What do you call 600 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? Marc Galanter calls it an opportunity to investigate the meanings of a rich and time-honored genre of American humor: lawyer jokes. Lowering the Bar analyzes hundreds of jokes from Mark Twain classics to contemporary anecdotes about Dan Quayle, Johnnie Cochran, and Kenneth Starr. Drawing on representations of law and lawyers in the mass media, political discourse, and public opinion surveys, Galanter finds that the increasing reliance on law has coexisted uneasily with anxiety about the “legalization” of society. Informative and always entertaining, his book explores the tensions between Americans’ deep-seated belief in the law and their ambivalence about lawyers.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Marc Galanter is the John and Rylla Bosshard Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Centennial Professor in the Department of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

REVIEWS

“A tour de force. . . . THE classic collection of lawyer jokes and analysis.”—Alan Dundes, University of California, Berkeley

“Lowering the Bar should be on the shelves of all humor scholars as a work of reference, on the shelves of all lawyers as a source of self-insight and to bring them repentance and on the shelves of anyone who likes to laugh at jokes.”—Christie Davies, HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research

TABLE OF CONTENTS

<new recto>
Contents
Tables and Illustrations	000
<LINE SPACE>
I. Introduction	000
	The Enlargement and Withdrawal of the Legal World	000
	Learning from Lawyer Jokes	000
		What is a joke?	000
		What is a lawyer joke?	000
		Lawyer's Jokes vs. Jokes About Lawyers	000
		The Lawyer Joke Corpus	000
		Recorded Jokes and Oral Transmission	000
		"Switching"	000
		Print media and the oral tradition	000
		Representativeness	000
		Tracing changes over time	000
		Does the joke corpus tell us about the legal culture?	000
<LINE SPACE>
Part One: The Enduring Core and Its Recent Accretions
II. Lies and Strategems: The Corruption of Discourse	000
	Lying and Dishonesty	000
	Workers in the Mills of Deceit	000
	Eloquence, Persuasiveness, Resourcefulness	000
	Hot Air: Lawyer Talk as Fakery and Bombast	000
	Masters of Stratagem	000
	The Lawyer Outsmarted	000
	The Ascendency of Lawyer Talk	000
<LINE SPACE>
III. The Lawyer as Economic Predator	000
	Only the Lawyer Wins	000
	Taking it All	000
	A Prodigious Predator	000
	Fee Simple	000
	Throwing the Meter	000
	Sexploitation: Predation as Sex/Sex as Predation	000
	The Justice Tariff	000
<LINE SPACE>
IV. The Devil's Playmates
	The Devil's Own	000
	Headed for Hell	000
	Absent in Heaven	000
	A Kingdom of This World	000
<LINE SPACE>
V. The Conflict Cluster: Lawyers as Fomenters of Strife	000
	Excess and Insufficient Combativeness	000
	Promoters of Conflict	000
	The Conniving Claimant	000
	Litigation Fever	000
	The Lawyer as Heroic Champion	000
<LINE SPACE>
VI. The Demography of the World of Lawyer Jokes	000
	The Hemispheric Prism	000
	Women in Combat	000
	Jews and Other Outsiders	000
	Seniors and Juniors	000
<LINE SPACE>
Part Two: The New Territories
VII. Lawyers as Betrayers of Trust	000
	Lawyers in a World of Declining Trust	000
	The Betrayal Joke Cluster	000
	Betrayal as Virtue	000
	What Do the Jokes Tell Us?	000
	An Excess of Loyalty?	000
<LINE SPACE>
VIII. The Lawyer as Morally Deficient	000
	A Suspect Profession	000
	Looking Out for Number One	000
	No Redeeming Social Value	000
	"He Just Doesn't Get It"	000
	In the Laboratory	000
<LINE SPACE>
IX. Lawyers as Objects of Scorn	000
	Closing the Circle of Scorn	000
	Sounding the Depths	000
	Into the Slime	000
	The Anal Connection	000
	The Uses of Scorn	000
<LINE SPACE>
X. "A Good Start!" Death Wish Jokes	000
	The Contemporary Onslaught	000
	Let's Kill All the Lawyers	000
	A Pestilential Affliction	000
	The Seventy Percent Legend	000
	Explaining the Flourishing of Death Wish Jokes	000
<LINE SPACE>
Part Three: The Justice Implosion	000
XI. Enemies of Justice	000
	Doing Justice	000
	The Lawyer as Enemy of Justice	000
	What Does Law Deliver?	000
<LINE SPACE>
XII. Only in America?	000
<LINE SPACE>
Appendix: Register of Jokes	000
Notes	000
References	000
Index	000

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