Lawyers are people who practice law. In most countries, lawyers enter their profession through a period of specialized study. Lawyers are a frequent target of criticism, in part because they are often the public face of unscrupulous parties such as persons being tried for crimes, because they employ a specialized jargon which makes it difficult for persons without a legal education to receive the benefits of the legal system without hiring a lawyer, and because they make up a disproportionate percentage of politicians.
- Dick: The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
Cade: Nay, that I mean to do.
- William Shakespeare, Henry the Sixth, Part II, IV, ii (1623)
- Is it not remarkable that the common repute which we all give to attorneys in the general is exactly opposite to that which every man gives to his own attorney in particular? Whom does anybody trust so implicitly as he trusts his own attorney? And yet is it not the case that the body of attorneys is supposed to be the most roguish body in existence?
- Anthony Trollope, Miss Mackenzie (1865), ch. 17 (Project Gutenburg e-text)
- [Lawyers] can make the worse appear the better cause, as though they were fresh from Leontine schools, and have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably innocent.
- Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying", Intentions (New York: Brentano's, 1905)
- Lawyers earn earn their bread in the sweat of their browbeating.
- James Huneker, Painted Veils (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1920), p. 137 (Google Books e-text)
- When there are too many policemen, there can be no liberty.
When there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace.
When there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice.
- Lin Yutang, Between Tears and Laughter (1943)
- This citation is too vague. If complete source details are not provided, the quotation may be deleted.
- About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists of telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop.
- Elihu Root, quoted in Philip C. Jessup, Elihu Root (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1964), vol. 1, p. 133, as cited by Lloyd B. Snyder, "Is attorney-client confidentiality necessary?", Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Spring 2002, p. 33
- An incompetent attorney can delay a trial for years or months. A competent attorney can delay one even longer.
- Evelle J. Younger, California Attorney General, Los Angeles Times, March 3, 1971.
- We have the heaviest concentration of lawyers on Earth—one for every five-hundred Americans; three times as many as are in England, four times as many as are in West Germany, twenty-one times as many as there are in Japan. We have more litigation, but I am not sure that we have more justice. No resources of talent and training in our own society, even including the medical care, is more wastefully or unfairly distributed than legal skills. Ninety percent of our lawyers serve 10 percent of our people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented.
- President Jimmy Carter, Remarks at the 100th Anniversary Luncheon of the Los Angeles County Bar Association, May 4, 1978 (American Presidency Project e-text)
- Let's ask ourselves: Does America really need 70 percent of the world's lawyers? Is it healthy for our economy to have 18 million new lawsuits coursing through the system annually? Is it right that people with disputes come up against staggering expense and delay?
- Vice President Dan Quayle, address to the American Bar Association, quoted in David Margolick. "Address by Quayle On Justice Proposals Irks Bar Association", New York Times, 1991-08-14. URL accessed on 2009-01-01.
- What are lawyers really? To me a lawyer is basically the person that knows the rules of the country. We're all throwing the dice, playing the game, moving our pieces around the board, but if there's a problem, the lawyer is the only person that has actually read the inside of the top of the box.
- Jerry Seinfeld, SeinLanguage (New York: Bantam, 1993), ISBN 0553096060, p. 90
- It may be that the jury would incline to regard a practising lawyer as a man of probity whose word was prima facie worthy of belief. But the belief of lawyers in their own probity is not universally shared, and there are those who believe them to be capable of almost any chicanery or sharp practice.
- Lord Bingham of Cornhill, writing for the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, in Singh v. The State (Trinidad and Tobago) [2005] UKPC 35 (03 August 2005)
- LAWYER: A professional advocate hired to bend the law on behalf of a paying client; for this reason considered the most suitable background for entry into politics.
- Rick Bayan, The Cynic's Dictionary (2003), ISBN 9780785817130
- This citation is too vague. If complete source details are not provided, the quotation may be deleted.
- A common and not necessarily apocryphal example portrays a solo practitioner starved for business in a small town. A second lawyer then arrives, and they both prosper.
- Deborah L. Rhode, In the Interests of Justice: Reforming the Legal Profession, Oxford US
- This citation is too vague. If complete source details are not provided, the quotation may be deleted.
Unsourced
- A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
- I never been to prison, but I've been to law school....
- Jacob Appel, playwright, Arborophilia (2005)
- He who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client.
- Proverb
- Lawyers are like nuclear missiles: I have mine, you have yours, and when we use them we fuck everything up.
- Other People's Money
External links
Wikipedia has an article about: Lawyers Look up lawyer in Wiktionary, the free dictionary
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