Lowering the Bar

Looking through the titles available at the library for my Nook, I ran across this one, written by University of Wisconsin law professor Marc Galantin. To quote the blurb at Amazon.com, 

"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."

It uses jokes to examine a serious topic and I think I learned something from perusing it. (Peruse is a fancy schmancy word for skim, by the way. One suspects lawyers use it all the time to imply that they studied a document when they really just glanced through it.) I already knew that the American take on law (rooted in the English take on same) is not the same as the Italian, French or even German take on law. But this book helped me appreciate that fact, and it reminded me never to take for granted universal agreement on fundamental things. At any rate, I don't know if you want to learn about the law in this way, but it is full of lawyer jokes for most any occasion or for no occasion at all. I kept running to Tom's office and interrupting him to tell him another one. As a retired lawyer, he smiled politely and went back to his computer game. I could almost hear his thoughts: "What did I get myself into?"

Oh, the answer to the 600 lawyers at the bottom of the sea question? "It's a start."