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Lawyers

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Those too the tyrant serve, who, skilled to snare the feet of justice in the toils of law, stand ready to oppress the weaker still, and right or wrong will vindicate for gold, sneering at public virtue, which beneath their pitiless tread lies torn and trampled where honor sits smiling at the sale of truth. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Lawyers are people who practice law, as a barrister, judge, attorney, counsel (counselor at law) or solicitor. Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political and social authority, and deliver justice. Working as a lawyer involves the practical application of abstract legal theories and knowledge to solve specific individualized problems, or to advance the interests of those who hire lawyers to perform legal services.


Quotes

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  • America is the paradise of lawyers.
    • Attributed to David J. Brewer in Champ Clark, My Quarter Century of American Politics (1920), vol. 2, p. 130.
  • 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.
  • Next, bring some lawyers to thy bar,
    By innuendo they might all stand there;
    There let them expiate that guilt,
    And pay for all that blood their tongues have spilt.
    These are the mountebanks of state,
    Who by the sleight of tongues can crimes create,
    And dress up trifles in the robes of fate,
    The mastiffs of a Government,
    To worry and run down the innocent.
  • Professionals, too, proved exceptionally susceptible to Hitler's 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 Fiihrer 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 God's tool for the annihilation of the bad forces of the earth. We fight in God's 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.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 242
  • A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
  • 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.
  • The function of the lawyer is to preserve a sceptical relativism in a society hell-bent for absolutes. The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell there will be nothing but law and due process will be meticulously observed.
  • Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
  • I pleaded your cause, Sextus, having agreed to do so for two thousand sesterces How is it that you have sent me only a thousand? "You said nothing," you tell me, "and this cause was lost through you." You ought to give me so much the more, Sextus, as I had to blush for you.
    • Martial, Epigrams, Bk. VIII, Ep. 18, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 410.
  • Lawyer — One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation.
  • 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.
    • Deborah L. Rhode, In the Interests of Justice: Reforming the Legal Profession, Oxford US (2000)
  • About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists of telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop.
    • Elihu Root, quoted in Philip C. Jessup, Elihu Root (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1964), vol. 1, p. 133, as cited by Lloyd B. Snyder, "Is attorney-client confidentiality necessary?", Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Spring 2002, p. 33.
  • What are lawyers really? To me a lawyer is basically the person that knows the rules of the country. We're all throwing the dice, playing the game, moving our pieces around the board, but if there's a problem, the lawyer is the only person that has actually read the inside of the top of the box.
  • Cade: Be brave, then; for your captain is brave, and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny, the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it felony to drink small beer; all the realm shall be in common; and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass; and when I am king, as king I will be, there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers and worship me their lord.
    Dick: The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
    Cade: Nay, that I mean to do.
  • Those too the tyrant serve, who, skilled to snare
    The feet of justice in the toils of law,
    Stand ready to oppress the weaker still,
    And right or wrong will vindicate for gold,
    Sneering at public virtue, which beneath
    Their pitiless tread lies torn and trampled where
    Honor sits smiling at the sale of truth.
  • Chuck McGill: I know you. I know what you were, what you are. People don't change. You're Slippin' Jimmy! And Slippin' Jimmy I can handle just fine, but Slippin' Jimmy with a law degree is like a chimp with a machine gun! The law is sacred! If you abuse that power, people get hurt! This is not a game. You have to know on some level, I know you know I'm right. You know I'm right!
  • Is it not remarkable that the common repute which we all give to attorneys in the general is exactly opposite to that which every man gives to his own attorney in particular? Whom does anybody trust so implicitly as he trusts his own attorney? And yet is it not the case that the body of attorneys is supposed to be the most roguish body in existence?
  • [Lawyers] can make the worse appear the better cause, as though they were fresh from Leontine schools, and have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably innocent.
  • The Court must have ministers : the attornies are its ministers.
    • Joseph Yates, J., Mayor of Norwich v. Berry (1766), 4 Burr. Part IV., p. 2115, reported in James William Norton-Kyshe, Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904), p. 16.
  • When there are too many policemen, there can be no individual liberty, when there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice, and when there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace.
    • Lin Yutang, Between Tears and Laughter (1943), p. 66.

See also

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