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Order in the court! Did you hear the one about . . .?
"What's black and brown and looks terrific on a lawyer?" "A Doberman." Lawyer jokes are so ubiquitous it seems right to ask: Why not plumbers? Or municipal-bond salesmen? Marc Galanter, professor emeritus of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, takes that question seriously. His new book, Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture(University of Wisconsin Press, 429 pages, $45), explores why we love bashing lawyers and what that says about our society. Galanter began collecting lawyer jokes in 1982, eventually reviewing 1,000 print collections in addition to those on CD-ROM, the Internet and elsewhere. The book is chock-full, with 300 jokes and 80 pages of endnotes (in case you didn't think this is a scholarly work). Lawyer jokes proliferated in the 1980s, when the law and its practitioners seemed to creep into every crevice of our lives. From the 1980s on, Galanter writes, U.S. citizens complained frequently that the country "has too much law, too many lawyers, too much litigation, and an obsessively contentious population that sues at the drop of a hat." The increase in divorce may also have put more people in touch with attorneys at the same time it became frowned on to repeat racist jokes in public.
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