Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture Book

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Contents
Tables and Illustrations 000
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I. Introduction 000
The Enlargement and Withdrawal of the Legal World 000
Learning from Lawyer Jokes 000
What is a joke? 000
What is a lawyer joke? 000
Lawyer's Jokes vs. Jokes About Lawyers 000
The Lawyer Joke Corpus 000
Recorded Jokes and Oral Transmission 000
"Switching" 000
Print media and the oral tradition 000
Representativeness 000
Tracing changes over time 000
Does the joke corpus tell us about the legal culture? 000
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Part One: The Enduring Core and Its Recent Accretions
II. Lies and Strategems: The Corruption of Discourse 000
Lying and Dishonesty 000
Workers in the Mills of Deceit 000
Eloquence, Persuasiveness, Resourcefulness 000
Hot Air: Lawyer Talk as Fakery and Bombast 000
Masters of Stratagem 000
The Lawyer Outsmarted 000
The Ascendency of Lawyer Talk 000
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III. The Lawyer as Economic Predator 000
Only the Lawyer Wins 000
Taking it All 000
A Prodigious Predator 000
Fee Simple 000
Throwing the Meter 000
Sexploitation: Predation as Sex/Sex as Predation 000
The Justice Tariff 000
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IV. The Devil's Playmates
The Devil's Own 000
Headed for Hell 000
Absent in Heaven 000
A Kingdom of This World 000
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V. The Conflict Cluster: Lawyers as Fomenters of Strife 000
Excess and Insufficient Combativeness 000
Promoters of Conflict 000
The Conniving Claimant 000
Litigation Fever 000
The Lawyer as Heroic Champion 000
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VI. The Demography of the World of Lawyer Jokes 000
The Hemispheric Prism 000
Women in Combat 000
Jews and Other Outsiders 000
Seniors and Juniors 000
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Part Two: The New Territories
VII. Lawyers as Betrayers of Trust 000
Lawyers in a World of Declining Trust 000
The Betrayal Joke Cluster 000
Betrayal as Virtue 000
What Do the Jokes Tell Us? 000
An Excess of Loyalty? 000
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VIII. The Lawyer as Morally Deficient 000
A Suspect Profession 000
Looking Out for Number One 000
No Redeeming Social Value 000
"He Just Doesn't Get It" 000
In the Laboratory 000
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IX. Lawyers as Objects of Scorn 000
Closing the Circle of Scorn 000
Sounding the Depths 000
Into the Slime 000
The Anal Connection 000
The Uses of Scorn 000
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X. "A Good Start!" Death Wish Jokes 000
The Contemporary Onslaught 000
Let's Kill All the Lawyers 000
A Pestilential Affliction 000
The Seventy Percent Legend 000
Explaining the Flourishing of Death Wish Jokes 000
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Part Three: The Justice Implosion 000
XI. Enemies of Justice 000
Doing Justice 000
The Lawyer as Enemy of Justice 000
What Does Law Deliver? 000
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XII. Only in America? 000
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Appendix: Register of Jokes 000
Notes 000
References 000
Index 000