These aphorisms I wrote are the bonus content at the end of my bestselling essay A System of Legal Logic (over 1000 copies sold! And, yes, for one day it was #1 on Amazon's bestselling litigation ebooks list), but I've decided to repost them here as a blog post, so that you can read them without buying my book.
The law is opinion ossified into knowledge. There are two types of arguments: the argument from subjective opinion, and the argument that old subjective opinions are knowledge that can’t be questioned.
Lawyers are the guns of modern duels.
A lawyer is a warrior of words.
The law is common sense justified by obscure technicalities. There are two types of arguments: the argument from common sense, and the argument from the obscure technicalities.
A lawsuit tells a story about right and wrong. There is only one winning argument: my client was a good person and the other party wronged him.
On any legal question there is always room for debate, but about this statement, too, there is room for debate.
A lawyer who cannot argue both sides of any issue will very quickly find himself with only half a clientele.
God, country, Jesus, and the US News & World Report law school rankings, but not necessarily in that order.
There are two types of lawyers: the arrogant elitist snobs, and the ones who were too stupid to become arrogant elitist snobs.
Textualism: what the law says. Originalism: Thomas Jefferson’s subjective feelings.
(A) A criminal law judge protects goodness from evil. (B) A criminal law judge protects clean people from trash. (C) A criminal law judge is a rich white man who has been given the authority to ruin poor Black young men’s lives by sending them to jail. Have I not just said the same thing three times from three different points of view?
Rigid rules, unfettered discretion, or the unfathomable compromise somewhere in between?
The law is what a lawyer says it is until someone proves him wrong.
The first thing we do is we kill all the people who tell lawyer jokes that aren’t really funny.
Legal writing should be written to be as strong as possible. Make your legal writing strong. MAKE your legal writing STRONG!
Be aggressively reasonable.
Go in, make your point, and get out. Don’t narrate.*
Be entertaining but informative, for a jury.
Persuasive public speaking, legal research, or technology: win in at least two of these three areas to win at trial.
Never make opposing counsel's argument for them.*
Never say never. Never say always.*
Be aggressively honest and assert the truth even to your own detriment. Juries tend not to believe lawyers whom they view as dishonest.
A case opinion which does not enable a lawyer to predict future holdings on similar yet different facts, and which does not enable law-abiding citizens to predict whether they break or obey the law, is as ephemeral as a puff of smoke, and as dangerous to the health!
The Legal Realists say that a judge rules based on what he ate for breakfast. This is true only if he ate for breakfast poison that shut down the language and cognitive function centers in his brain.
A multi-factor fact-specific balancing test? Oh, you mean just let the judge do whatever he wants and do whatever his feelings tell him to do, right? Why not just say so?
A partner has to succeed. An associate has to avoid failure.
If the associates are the exploited slaves of the partners, they are the most well-compensated slaves in human history.
A great trial lawyer plans out in advance the inferences the jury will draw and when they will draw them.
The benefit to society of the legal profession should be measured by what happens to people who hire bad attorneys. (Hint: what happens is they get a trove of horrors when their lawyer messes up their case!)
Lawyers dance across the hot coals of legal uncertainty every day.
A client is paying his lawyer to be superhuman.
A trial is like an election. It’s a popularity contest, high IQ is not always what wins, and sometimes people cheat.
The judge can do whatever he wants. Whether he is right or wrong to do it is another matter entirely.
The art of legal writing is the art of making arguments to a judge who is too busy to consider your arguments. As such, what you say does not matter, but what you seem to have said is all-important.
What does it mean in legal doctrines to say that something must be “reasonable”? “Reasonable” either means nothing or else it means everything. It means not too much, not too little, and whatever standard of measurement is asserted as the truth for measuring too much and too little—ah, but how to measure is nothing or everything!
*The ones marked with an asterisk I must attribute to various friends and/or my past law professors. All others are my own unique original creations.
