NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Did you hear that Saddam Hussein took a hundred lawyers hostage and said that if his demands aren’t met, he’ll start releasing them one by one?
Question: How many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: How many can you afford?
There are hundreds of such jokes about lawyers collected in Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture, by Marc Galanter, published by the University of Wisconsin Press.
Galanter, the John and Rylla Bosshard Professor of Law and South Asia Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and LSE Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, will speak about lawyer jokes at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 21 in the Moore Room of Vanderbilt Law School.
The lecture is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by Vanderbilt’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities and Vanderbilt Law School.
Galanter has tracked down thousands of lawyer jokes, and used 300 as examples in the book, which traces the evolution of jokes about lawyers as a window to changing public attitudes about lawyers and the law. The jokes have become increasingly popular, with a dramatic increase during the 1980s.
“The jokes are a screen on which people project their feelings about lawyers and the law,” Galanter told The Star-Ledger in October.
Galanter says that the increasing popularity of lawyer jokes reflects anxiety about the extent law has come to dominate lives in our highly legalized society.