Prologue

Table Of Contents

        Two dead bodies are laying in the street

         One is a lawyer, the other is a dog.

         How do you tell which is which?

         ... the dog has skid marks in front of it

 

         A lawyer falls overboard from a cruise line ship

         hours later he was found surrounded by man-eating sharks.

         Yet, when he was recovered he didn't have a scratch on him

         ... Why?

         ... Professional courtesy

 

         A plane mysteriously crashes in the mountains

         There were 140 mostly business and professional passengers.

         The bad news is there were only 10 survivors

         The good news is not one of them was a lawyer

 

         Do you know why they now use lawyers

         for scientific lab experiments instead of rats?

         ... Because they’ll do things even rats won’t do

 

         What do you call it when you find

         500 lawyers lying at the bottom of the sea?

         ... It’s a start

 

 

Have you ever wondered why there were so many lawyer jokes?  Why is it that lawyers bear the brunt of so many jokes? I mean just think about it! In general you never hear such jokes about truck drivers, carpenters, cooks, doctors, teachers, TV repair persons, gardeners, insurance salesmen, or whatever other occupational group.  But lawyers ... that's different!  We  have all been exposed to numerous jokes about them in mostly unflattering ways. Why is there such universal animosity and hostility toward lawyers? And the constant barrage of lawyer  jokes seems to keep coming at an ever increasing rate.

 


Can it be that these lawyer jokes signal something very important?   Are these lawyer jokes merely the harbinger of coming great changes in our legal system? Do they signal something very significant is about to happen with the whole way our society  relates to law, the legal system, and lawyers as a group? Are we as a society at the crossroads of  a  revolutionary  earthquake of change relating to how we comprehend and cope with our system of legal jurisprudence, democratic law, and the whole legal profession?

 

Perhaps, our society is very anxious about lawyers, the legal profession, and the whole general experience with our system of justice as it has currently evolved in America today. Maybe these lawyer jokes tell us far more than we realize.

 

Before you can fix something, you have to realize it is  broken. And it just may be that the great preponderance of these emerging negative lawyer jokes are precisely what is needed to begin to educate everyone, to get them to realize that our legal system is desperately broken.  The jokes point to problems; and we should try to analyze carefully just what they really mean in the overall scheme of things --- particularly with reference to our lawyer-led, system of justice.

 

We need to realize that the whole practice of law in America today is out of step with the American people and the  realities of their everyday lives. In fact, excessive legal-

ism has "turned on" society and is cannibalizing our very democratic existence and continued survival as a viable  nation. It is like the wolf who stepped into a trap and chews off its leg in order to free itself --- no matter that if it does succeed in chewing off its leg, it will surely die anyway --- perhaps sooner rather than later.

 

These last two points are the basic essence of what this book is about. We'll try to prove the practice of law in America, and more generally our legal system is dangerously broken. Then we'll spend a considerable amount of time making suggestions on how to fix it.

 


If the legal system, and the whole practice of law in America today is, indeed, broken and in need of serious change and repair; what are the symptoms by which we can know this? And can we do anything about it? These are also among the basic questions examined in this book.