Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for August 18, 2010

How is that even a debate? Corporate lawyers will take the left path every time, while claiming that they’re taking the right path.

Or they will sit down, rest against the post and watch others walk down the same path.

Three people arrive at the gates of heaven and St. Peter greeted them. “Welcome to Heaven. We have simplified the process of admission, and all you need to do to get into Heaven is pass a simple test. Are you ready?”

The first person said, “I’ve prepared for this moment for 73 years.”

“Okay,” said St. Peter, “spell ‘God’.”

“G-O-D.”

“Very good, enter your eternal reward.”

“That was easier than I thought it would be,” the second person said, “I’ll take my test now.”

“Okay,” said St. Peter, “spell ‘love’.”

“L-O-V-E.”

“Excellent, enter your eternal reward.”

The third person, a lawyer, said, “Boy, is this is gonna be a snap. Give me my test.”

“Okay,” said St. Peter, “spell ‘prorhipidoglossomorpha’.”

Left turn without hesitation: dataweaver has it completely right.

That sign would make more sense if the arrows pointed in the same direction.

More lawyer bashing: Q: Why don’t lawyers go to the beach? A: Cats keep trying to bury them in the sand.

Q. What do you call 50 lawyers in a bus laying at the bottom of the ocean.

A. Not enough but a fairly good start.

All lawyers face this choice, so why does Wiley make it a corporate lawyer? Because of his prejudice against the business world that he constantly denies having. “It’s just a joke.” Yeah, right.

@Proginoskes: It makes perfect sense as is. That which is ethical is almost always legal. That which is legal is not necessarily ethical. And when it comes to Corporate Law, I refer you to yesterday’s strip.

how to stump ANY lawyer…

Magnamax–good idea but it won’t work, these guys have the best antispam software around. I bet they just recycle incoming into more spam.

I need a shyster this morning.

We can switch the word around and I’d think there will be different comments here.

How to stump a cartoonist.

For all of you dumping on lawyers today, please know that there are only 3 lawyer jokes……………… all the rest are TRUE!

I think the point here is that corporate lawyers aren’t use to going in either direction. Sort of like coming to an intersection with routes marked north and south and you want to go east. He’s looking for the third route marked “profitable”.

Everyone dumps on lawyers until they actually need one.

to quote Machiavelli, “when the revolution begins, kill the lawyers first”.

Oh the sad part is that the cartoon is right: often legal and ethical do NOT follow the same course. … it isn’t the lawyer who is at fault, but the yahoos making the laws!

Never use more concrete than you need to bury a lawyer up to his neck….head first.

whats the difference between a dead lawyer on the road, and a dead snake? theres skid-marks in front of the snake.

The lawyers are the yahoo’s that make the laws. The laws are made to be beaten by the lawyers.

“…it isn’t the lawyer who is at fault, but the yahoos making the laws!”

Those who make the laws usually are lawyers, in addition to being politicians.

At the keynote speech of the American Psychological Association, the APA President recently announced that all APA approved graduate programs would no longer use rats as subjects in behavioral studies.

“From this point on, all programs will use lawyers instead of rats. This is being done with three things in mind.

First, there are more lawyers than rats.

Second, PETA will not complain about the use of rats as experimental subjects.

And third, there are some things that you just can’t get a rat to do.”

Also a dilemma for politicians!

Is it true “lawyer” is Latin for “liar”?

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the controversy of the mosque at Ground Zero. Remove “Corporate Lawyer” and the same thing applies.

Lawyers are proof that some life forms did in fact evolve from primordial soup………Pond Scum!… Then they evolve into judges who legislate from the bench!

Broad-brushing all Muslims with the 9/11 tragedy is like saying Catholic priests are all child molesters - it just ain’t so! Or, hypothetically, refusing to build a Catholic church in Oklahoma City because of Timothy McVeigh’s religion. It’s an easy scapegoat…

Corporate lawyers do the bidding of their corporate clients.

CEO: “I don’t pay you guys to tell me what I can and can’t do. I pay you to tell me HOW to do what I WANT to do.”

Lawyers also take the job of self-policing seriously. Corporate executives have no such organizations, either formal or informal.

“Legal” deals with the letter of the law, “Ethical” deals with the spirit of the law. But the laws are interpreted and enforced only by the letter, which is why contracts and laws must be so excruciatingly precise.

PSchearer:

Prejudice against big corporations is not the same as prejudice against individuals or groups of people.

Corporations have earned our distrust and disdain.

I’m thinking of BP , Enron and the like…

Hey Nabuquduriuzhur ,

Did you play the part of Cliffy in the tv show Cheers?

I’m noticing a strong resemblance.

it all depends on how you define “legal” and/or “ethical”…

and re: spammers, if they get an email, they know it’s a good address….

The earth is round and by heading off in one direction one is bound to wind up traveling eventually on the other path - so you see it is just very Zen in its simplicity.

Upon seeing an elderly lady for the drafting of her will, the attorney charged her $100. She gave him a $100 bill, not noticing that it was stuck to another $100 bill.

On seeing the two bills stuck together, the ethical question came to the attorney’s mind: “Do I tell my partner?”

Bonus: What do you get if you cross the Godfather with a lawyer?

An offer you can’t understand.

But logicman the yahoos making the laws are lawyers.

Laws presumably promote justice and social welfare as much as possible. There are many areas of ambiguity depending on everyone’s unique situation. And lawyers are interpreters, many who work for public interest or pro bono (free), and a needed force in society who have the responsibility to advocate settlement instead of going to a courtroom. I believe the pompous, glamorous, cashmongering lifestyle portrayed in TV is not the case for most public contributors known as lawyers.

Is this a trick question? wouldn’t a real lawyer choose “none of the above?”

Stebon, as was pointed out above, the lines were spoken by an ignorant rioter, bent on imposing mob rule. Even the penny groundlings seeing the play would have known that it was NOT given as a reasonable suggestion.

We are a society of laws. The laws are written so that they cover all of desired effects, and exclude the undesireable effects. That’s difficult to do in “plain talk”, so there’s much that’s unintelligible to laymen, or seems like meaningless hair-splitting. Lawyers learn to split hairs because there might be massive consequences if they don’t..

But people get angry when somebody who does understand the laws tells them they aren’t allowed to do something they want to, or that the other fellow may legally do something they don’t themselves like.

As was also pointed out above, it’s very easy to hate lawyers until you need one. Then you want the best one you can get (who’s likely to be the lawyer you’d hate most if he were on the other side).

What do you call 10,000 lawyers up to their necks in sand below the high tide line?

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A good start.

@Fritzoid, the opposite method for laws is to give the central, clear principle, and then have people who can apply it to specific cases and situations. That way you don’t need 100s or 1000s of pages to spell out every single case and effect, so that not even the “experts” know what’s actually in the law, much less the average person.

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse”–but who has time to know what these laws actually say? Not even those who passed them.

And even these efforts to cover every possibility fail anyway–nobody can foresee every case and circumstance. Which is why the Executive branch has to issue opinions and rules and regulations–more laws, in effect–and the Judiciary has to interpret what it all means, and so on.

Why not have simple, clear, understandable laws rather than all the complicated morass we have now?

bmonk, the laws ARE written as simply as possible. If you write them as generalities, like the Bill of Rights, then everybody knows what they say but nobody can agree on what they mean. It’s still full employment for lawyers, because they’d be the ones who keep track of how the law was applied in different instances. The goal is uniformity of application.

A simple, broad, and general law is passed. Smith performs an action that Harrison believes is against the law. Smith argues that his action is legal. Judge Brown rules in favor of the plaintiff, and it becomes precedent. Jones performs another action, another action is brought, but Judge Green rules that the case has a key difference from Smith, and rules for the defense, citing the difference. That, too, becomes precedent. Kelly performs an action. When brought to court, he argues that his act was allowable under Jones, but Judge White rules for plaintiff, citing Smith. Kelly appeals, and the appellate court overrules White, and Kelly now is precedent as well. Before you perform an action of your own, it’s useless to know about the law if you’ve never heard of Smith, Jones, and Kelly.

Eventually, that simple law must be rewritten, because its ambiguity has led to such a wide range of treatments that nobody knows what it means without studying thousands and thousands of pages of precedential decisions. The rewritten version isn’t so simply worded, but it at least distinguishes Smith’s actions from Jones’s and Kelly’s.

The reason your mortgage documents, insurance policies, and yes your criminal and regulatory codes are so convoluted and arcane is because people have brought every possible ambiguity before a court somewhere. The more explicit and hair-splitting the laws, the less chance there is for arbitrary application and enforcement.

It’s relatively easy to understand a law like “Thou shalt not kill” or “Thou shalt not steal.” But what about the sound ethical value of “Thou shalt not cheat”? “Thou shalt not con”? “Thou shalt give even unto suckers an even break”?

Those would be impossible to codify.

What about “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”? How would you apply that? The best you could do is “Do unto others as you believe your trial judge would have done unto him if he were you.”

worldisacomic – legislating from the bench is a term usually used by people dissatisfied with a judges’ ruling.

Our judiciary has always had the responsibility of reviewing the constitutionality of any law – whether made by the legislature or voted on by the electorate (as in propositions). Check Marbury v. Madison for the precedent.