Lawyers

"Courage remains as important in the legal profession today as it was then. Throughout our history lawyers who have made the greatest mark on this country havent done so because they were smarter or were born into better families or held more important positions; it was because they were willing to stand firm for justice in the face of immense pressure and often at grave personal costs."

"That makes me think, my friend, as I have often done before, how natural it is that those who have spent a long time in the study of philosophy appear ridiculous when they enter the courts of law as speakers…. Those who have knocked about in courts and the like from their youth up seem to me, when compared with those who have been brought up in philosophy and similar pursuits, to be as slaves in breeding compared with freemen."

"A common and not necessarily apocryphal example portrays a solo practitioner starved for business in a small town. A second lawyer then arrives, and they both prosper."

"Professionals, too, proved exceptionally susceptible to Hitlers appeal. Lawyers and doctors were substantially over-represented within the NSDAP, as were university students (then a far narrower section of society than today). To fat middle-aged lawyers, he was the heir to Bismarck. For their sons, he was the Wagnerian hero Rienzi, the demagogue who unites the people of Rome. Right down to the last, deepest fibre in myself, I belong to the Führer and his wonderful movement, wrote the Nazi lawyer Hans Frank in his diary after a concert he had attended with Hitler on February 10, 1937. We are in truth Gods tool for the annihilation of the bad forces of the earth. We fight in Gods name against Jews and their Bolshevism. God protect us! Such thoughts helped him and many other lawyers to come to terms with the systematic illegality that characterized the regime from the very outset: the arrests without trial (26,000 people were already in protective custody as early as July 1933), the summary executions (beginning with the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934, when between eighty-five and two hundred people, including the over-mighty leaders of the SA, were murdered in cold blood) and, of course, the escalating discrimination against racial and social minorities."

"We have the heaviest concentration of lawyers on Earth—one for every five-hundred Americans; three times as many as are in England, four times as many as are in West Germany, twenty-one times as many as there are in Japan. We have more litigation, but I am not sure that we have more justice. No resources of talent and training in our own society, even including the medical care, is more wastefully or unfairly distributed than legal skills. Ninety percent of our lawyers serve 10 percent of our people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented."

"Courage has been essential to the rule of law in this country from the beginning. The Declaration of Independence itself was, at heart, a complaint that the king had denied colonists the rule of law. As justification for their rebellion, colonists cited the fact that the king had withheld assent to duly enacted legislation, refused trial by jury, and prevented colonists from playing a significant role in their own governance. About half of the fifty-six colonists who signed the Declaration were lawyers. They quite literally put their lives on the line to secure a representative government and one of just laws: By signing the declaration, they became marked men who faced certain death if their cause failed."

"The duke stabs a forefinger into his shoulder. “You…person,” he says; and again, “you nobody from Hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer.”"

"The goddess Peri became so jealous that she laid a curse on my mother, who turned into a lawyer."

"America is the paradise of lawyers."

"[F]or a long time I used to think that anal sex was how lawyers were conceived."

"It may be that the jury would incline to regard a practising lawyer as a man of probity whose word was prima facie worthy of belief. But the belief of lawyers in their own probity is not universally shared, and there are those who believe them to be capable of almost any chicanery or sharp practice."

"It has an unhappy effect upon the human understanding and temper, for a man to be compelled in his gravest investigation of an argument, to consider, not what is true, but what is convenient. The lawyer never yet existed who has not boldly urged an objection which he knew to be fallacious, or endeavoured to pass off a weak reason for a strong one. Intellect is the greatest and most sacred of all endowments; and no man ever trifled with it, defending an action to-day which he had arraigned yesterday, or extenuating an offence on one occasion, which, soon after, he painted in the most atrocious colours, with absolute impunity. Above all, the poet, whose judgment should be clear, whose feelings should be uniform and sound, whose sense should be alive to every impression and hardened to none, who is the legislator of generations and the moral instructor of the world, ought never to have been a practising lawyer, or ought speedily to have quitted so dangerous an engagement."