RT Article
T1 In Praise of a Gentle Soul
JF Journal of law and religion
VO 10
IS 2
SP 279
OP 290
A1 Gaffney, Edward McGlynn
LA English
PB Cambridge Univ. Press
YR 1993
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1823291023
AB It was a bad summer for lawyers. Just when we were getting used to the possibility that Tom Cruise might be a fine young JAG lawyer capable of ferreting out evil in high places in "A Few Good Men," it seems that he's just another Harvard lawyer on the make and on the lamb both from the Mob and the FBI in "The Firm." And who can forget the scene in "Jurassic Park" when a mouthy lawyer gets et alive by tyrannosaurus rex redivivus, to the cheers of the vulgar mobs in the theaters? The good news is that the consumption of the lawyer occurs off camera.Last summer 6,321 new lawyer jokes were added to the genre. My favorite asks why lawyers are buried 20 feet down instead of 6, with the reply that deep down lawyers are really good.It wasn't much better two summers ago, when one of the most famous of the lawyer jokers, J. Danforth Quayle, gave his "too many lawyers" speech at the summer meeting of the ABA. Actually I thought the Vice-President made some good points, but was quite unfocused, omitting any consideration, for example, of the maldistribution of lawyers in our society that causes many real needs for legal services to go unmet. Those of you with an empirical bent will be pleased to learn that shortly after Quayle's speech, his statistics were repudiated as wildly inaccurate.
DO 10.2307/1051133