Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture
Justin Miller Award Recipient
Benjamin A. Stark
Justin Miller Award Category
Integrity
Justin Miller Award Date
2006
Description
What do you call 600 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? Marc Galanter calls it an opportunity to investigate the meanings of a rich and time-honored genre of American humor: lawyer jokes. Lowering the Bar analyzes hundreds of jokes from Mark Twain classics to contemporary anecdotes about Dan Quayle, Johnnie Cochran, and Kenneth Starr. Drawing on representations of law and lawyers in the mass media, political discourse, and public opinion surveys, Galanter finds that the increasing reliance on law has coexisted uneasily with anxiety about the “legalization” of society. Informative and always entertaining, his book explores the tensions between Americans’ deep-seated belief in the law and their ambivalence about lawyers.
Publisher
University of Wisconsin Press
Publication Date
2005
ISBN
9780299213503