Using Lawyer Jokes to Teach Business Ethics: A Course Module (original) (raw)
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Approaching Ethics Through Humor
It is becoming clear that something has to be done in the United States to teach the importance of ethics and values. This paper takes a unique approach and shows how lawyer jokes can be used to illustrate the importance of business ethics. It is highly unlikely that jokes can cause a stereotype. What is more probable is that jokes and stereotypes have common origins. Most of us will agree that the legal profession gets little respect in the United States; sadly, there is a good reason for this. The public does not trust lawyers and sees most of them as dishonest. One doubts that there is any other profession that has resulted in so many vicious jokes. Even presidents of the United States tell lawyer jokes; the following joke is attributed to Teddy Roosevelt: "A man who never graduated from school might steal from a freight car. But a man who attends college and graduates as a lawyer might steal the whole railroad."
The lawyer as animal in American lawyer jokes
European Journal of Humour Research
In the early 1980s a new joke cycle appeared in the USA, and has continued to flourish ever since. This is the lawyer joke cycle. The greatest anger and irritation in lawyer jokes is directed at the cost of lawsuits, the high income of lawyers, as well as their greed and stinginess, ignorance and skillful manipulation, corruption and dishonesty. In American lawyer jokes there is a long tradition of comparing lawyers to different animals, generally ones which are considered dangerous, poisonous or slyall animals which have very negative connotations. It is not surprising that, among the parallels, one can find predators of different kinds, scavengers and parasites. The animals most frequently brought up in jokes as parallels to lawyers are sharks, vultures, tigers, snakes, foxes, ticks, leeches, and rats. The goal of this study is to concentrate only on a small segment of American lawyer jokes, namely, jokes in which lawyers are compared to animals.
On the Popular Image of the Lawyer: Reflections in a Dark Glass
California Law Review, 1987
The most striking aspect of the image of the lawyer in popular culture is the intense hostility with which it is invested. Lawyers, to be sure, may have more than their fair share of common moral shortcomings. But they do not as individuals seem so very different from the rest of the population as to justify the special level of animosity that the profession seems to arouse in the general public. One thinks, for example, of the present genre of what has come to be called "lawyer jokes." For instance: Question: What is the difference between a dead lawyer in the road and a dead skunk? Answer: There are skid marks by the skunk. Or: Question: Why did the research scientist substitute lawyers for rats in his laboratory experiments? Answer: Lawyers breed more rapidly, scientists became less attached to them, and there are some things that rats just won't do. Lawyer bashing is of course nothing new. The genre goes back a long way. St. Luke says in the New Testament: "Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne. ... "i Every lawyer or legal academic carries as a particularly heavy part of her cultural training the usual and vicious swipes at lawyers, from Shakespeare's "let's kill all the lawyers," 2 to Sir Thomas More's exclusion of lawyers from his Utopia because they are "a sort of people, whose profession it is to disguise matters." 3 The nineteenth-century readers and spellers of American schoolchildren often contained a game called "the Colonists,"
The Watergate break-in and its cover-up in the early 1970s convinced the American public that lawyers will do illegal and immoral things for the sake of their clients' and their own interests. The organized bar responded to Watergate with several steps that were designed to clean up the profession. The ABA adopted a new set of professional rules,' law schools required students to study professional responsibility, and states required that lawyers pass a special professional responsibility exam. But continued problems in the legal profession have followed this attention to professional rules. In addition to the highly publicized lawyer leadership in the corporate takeover, savings and loan, and Whitewater scandals, observers of the legal profession find among lawyers a growing preoccupation with making money, 2 an increase in litigiousness, greater incivility, and more misuse of legal procedure. 3 It may be that the problem in the legal profession is not too little attention to rules, but too little attention to character.
2014
The Watergate break-in and its cover-up in the early 1970s convinced the American public that lawyers will do illegal and immoral things for the sake of their clients' and their own interests. The organized bar responded to Watergate with several steps that were designed to clean up the profession. The ABA adopted a new set of professional rules,' law schools required students to study professional responsibility, and states required that lawyers pass a special professional responsibility exam. But continued problems in the legal profession have followed this attention to professional rules. In addition to the highly publicized lawyer leadership in the corporate takeover, savings and loan, and Whitewater scandals, observers of the legal profession find among lawyers a growing preoccupation with making money, 2 an increase in litigiousness, greater incivility, and more misuse of legal procedure. 3 It may be that the problem in the legal profession is not too little attention to rules, but too little attention to character. This crisis in the legal profession is the subject of recent books by Yale law professor (now dean) Anthony T. Kronman 4 and Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon. 5 Neither Glendon nor Kronman calls for new professional rules. They resist the Enlightenment (and lawyerly) temptation to propose a rule to solve every problem. In very different ways, each calls for a return to an older, more subtle moral tradition-the exercise of virtues.