Press kit for Lowering the Bar


Galanter press kit | Press Release | Excerpts | Author's bio | Reviews | Cover image for Web publicity | Cover image for publicity in print publications, higher resolution | Author's photo | For additional information

 

Lowering the Bar
Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture
Marc Galanter
FIRST PAPERBACK EDITION
Publication date October 2006

LC: 2005005443 K
448 pp. 7 x 10 57 b/w illus.
ISBN: 0-299-21354-4 Paper $26.95 t
ISBN-13: 978-0-299-21354-1

Cloth edition publication date was October 2005
ISBN 0-299-21350-1 Cloth $45.00 s



"Hilarious and philosophical at the same time, a nifty probe of the genre, regularly guilty of wise humor."—Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer

"I never realized how funny and serious lawyer jokes could be. Galanter does to lawyer jokes what Freud did to Jewish jokes in his classic Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, but sometimes a good joke is just a good joke."—Alan Dershowitz, author of Rights from Wrongs

"This book should be on every folklorist's and lawyer's shelf, although the latter may want to put it in a plain brown wrapper."—Jan Harold Brunvand, author of Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid: The Book of Scary Urban Legends

"Anyone who finds lawyer jokes humorous (including most lawyers) or has always wondered about how and why they became so popular will very much enjoy this 'lowering of the bar.'"—Alan J. Couture, ForeWord Magazine

Excerpts

"Two lawyers are sitting at a bar drinking when a stunning blonde in a skin-tight, low-cut dress slinks by. One of them stares for a minute, then turns to his buddy and says, 'Boy, would I like to screw her!'
The other lawyer asks, 'Out of what?'"

"An ancient, nearly blind old woman retained the local lawyer to draft her last will and testament, for which he charged her two hundred dollars. As she rose to leave, she took the money out of her purse and handed it to him, enclosing a third hundred dollar bill by mistake. Immediately the attorney realized he was faced with a crushing ethical question: Should he tell his partner?"

"Q: How many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: How many can you afford?"

"When President Theodore Roosevelt was trying to persude his son to become a lawyer, he used the following argument: "A man who never graduated from school might steal from a fteight car. But a man who attends college and graduates as a lawyer might steal the whole railroad."

"Two muggers met in an alley, one of them breathless.
I just tried to mug a lawyer," the man panted.
"Cripes," said the other. "He get anything?"
—excerpts from Lowering the Bar

Author's Bio
Marc Galanter is the John and Rylla Bosshard Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Centennial Professor in the Department of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science.


Reviews
Reviews will be posted.

For more information in addition to this press kit contact our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu

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Cover image:

cover of Lowering the Bar is black, with an illustration of a blue man with a briefcase crushed by a white anvil, inscribed with a lawyer joke

This cover image can be downloaded and used in any web-based publicity for this book. For a 300 dpi version for use in print, click here.

Author's photo



Photo is copyright © Bob Rashid. This image can be downloaded, but must be used only for web-based publicity for this book. Download a 300 dpi version of this photo here.

Please direct any inquiries for further publicity materials or photo permissions to our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu

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