Marc Galanter Quotations

Lawyers in the United States have a central role, a visibility and prominence that doesn't exist anywhere else.

You can learn from them, you can see what is bothering people. ... The jokes are a screen on which people project their feelings about lawyers and the law.

We have 500-year-old lawyer jokes still in circulation and most of them go back at least 100 years. But around the 1980s, there was a great shift. They became much more hostile.

The smaller the jury, the more variance you get just from the play of the numbers.

A colleague asked me how many lawyer jokes there are. I told him just three ? the rest are documented case histories.

For elites, there is this hostility toward lawyers because they see lawyers as sort of attacking them ... but at the same time, for the larger population, there is a kind of disappointment with law. There was a sense that lawyers were going to bring remedies and justice -- and (they don't), so everybody ends up having a grievance about lawyers.

In the public imagery, jury trials are very emblematic to people of what the law is.

I don't look to jokes as a balanced look at life. But they can be an indicator. Jokes work on shared and collective perceptions among people.