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Did you hear the one about the lawyer? Seriously
One of the hallmarks of late twentieth century societies was the growth of law. Regulation has now intruded into all manner of aspects of daily life. Lawyers have moved to the forefront in this embrace of law. Just one statistic: total spending on civil legal services in Canada grew from $1.9 billion in 1973 to $11 billion by 1993. Of course, much good has come of this spreading of law's domain: the protection of human rights, the safeguarding of the environment, the breaking of the thrall of smoking are but a few items on law's list of achievements. But there are anxieties, too. Worries about a culture of "legalization": the angst that, increasingly, it is law and only law that is holding society together as the bonds of voluntary associations, community groups, and churches seem to be ever loosening. There are many indications of this legalization: reliance on litigation to address increasing number of complex issues once remitted to representative politics for resolution, the insinuation of law into areas once thought to be mostly "law free" zones health care, education, and religious life, etc. - and "rights talk" about all manner of items on the menu of daily life. Marc Galanter suggests another indicator of legalization: jokes about lawyers. Do I hear a chorus of "Oh give us a break!" Well hold on. Galanter is a distinguished law and society scholar. He is world famous for his contributions to the study of many facets of legal culture in the United States and beyond. His Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005) is provocative and fascinating. Galanter's basic premise is that, since about 1980 in the US there has been a significant increase in jokes about lawyers and they have become much nastier. These perverted efforts at humour arise from deepseated anxieties that that ever increasingly legalized society is essentially adrift; that a people held together by scarcely anything but law share little indeed. Galanter's conjectures have a sense of depressing accuracy about them. At the same time he might have entertained other explanations. Among these alternative possibilities would surely be the debasement of many forms of public discourse in the Republic. Watch scream television for but a few minutes and the lawyer jokes appear as a sad part of a large, dark phenomenon.
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