Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780299213541)

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.

Author: Marc Galanter
ISBN-10: 0299213544
ISBN-13: 9780299213541
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Language: English
Published: 08/08/2006
Pages: 448
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.73lbs
Size: 10.00h x 7.02w x 0.94d