Lawyer Jokes

Morgan,

I’ll accept the challenge and will use my five minutes (or, if you want to put it in terms of billable hours, my “o.1”) to address the subject of lawyer jokes.

We’ve all heard them.  They range from the predictably annoying (Q. “What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?” A. “A good start.”) to the fairly amusing:

The professional pet peeve that I’ll share is the serial misuse of the famous line from Shakespeare’s Henry VI — “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” as a criticism of lawyers, a sort of literary lawyer joke.

Why does this bug me?  One reason is that the quotation is most likely an argument for the importance of lawyers (it’s the member of an angry mob trying to bring down the state that’s being quoted here, after all).

But it may not be that straightforward.  The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog has some nice analysis here.