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Professor's book charts hostile trends in lawyer jokes
He's not exactly a seasoned comic, but University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Marc Galanter knows so many lawyer jokes, he even has a joke about lawyer jokes. "A colleague asked me how many lawyer jokes there are. I told him just three the rest are documented case histories," Galanter told an audience Tuesday at Vanderbilt University's Law School. Galanter's routine is part of a lecture tour he's doing to promote his new book that charts the increasingly bitter tone of lawyer jokes over the past couple of decades. "We have 500-year-old lawyer jokes still in circulation and most of them go back at least 100 years," Galanter says. "But around the 1980s, there was a great shift. They became much more hostile." In "Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture," Galanter says the animosity is a backlash to the increasing legal restrictions that have reached into American life. "Lawyers in the United States have a central role, a visibility and prominence that doesn't exist anywhere else," Galanter says, even in countries with similar legal systems. Over the course of the 1980s, public perception shifted from viewing lawyers as champions of justice to viewing them as arbitrators under a complex, artificial law system that only they understand, Galanter says. As American society grew more complex and global, lawyers became more necessary in everyday life, Galanter says. But they also came to be seen as obstructions to a normal social order. Galanter says the historical lawyer jokes have two basic themes: They are greedy, and they are smooth-talkers.
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