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Enjoy a break this summer with some of the lighter books in the library's collection. Associate Director Kurt Metzmeier highlights books that focus on the humorous side of the law, from outrageous laws to legal cartoons, there's something here for everyone who needs a laugh.
There are a lot of legal humor books that reprint dubious stories with little sourcing. However, the law library owns a series of books with legitimate lawyer war stories ripped from the dockets of actual California courts. With stories collected by Rodney R. Jones, a criminal lawyer and bar journal columnist, Charles M. Sevilla, a top criminal lawyer, and Gerald F. Uelmen, a professor of Santa Clara University School of Law in Santa Clara, California (and dean from 1986 to 1994), these books reprint actual court papers and transcripts—with names changed to protect the stupid.
Another area where urban myth often poses as truth is in the repeating of so-called “dumb laws.” My favorite is the supposed Kentucky law barring the shooting of sharks from a helicopter. Now, while some fishing regulations do bar the use of firearms by anglers, and sharks are fish, no shark-protection law exists. But the American Bar Association has come to the rescue of these fake strange laws with a lawyer-approved collection of odd laws—all properly cited using the Bluebook citation manual.
"Few people associate law books with humor. Yet the legal world--in particular the American legal system--is itself frequently funny. Indeed, jokes about the profession are staples of American comedy. And there is actually humor within the world of law too: both lawyers and judges occasionally strive to be funny to deal with the drudgery of their duties.”
In Guilty Pleasures, “Laura Little provides a multi-faceted account of American law and humor, looking at constraints on humor (and humor's effect on law), humor about law, and humor in law." In Marc Galanter’s Lowering the Bar, “hundreds of jokes from Mark Twain classics to contemporary anecdotes” are analyzed to explore “tensions between Americans' deep-seated belief in the law and their ambivalence about lawyers."
Edward J. Bander, Law Librarian Emeritus at Suffolk University, has produced the "most definitive collection of legal anecdotes in print,” while professors Jarvis, Baker and McClung offer a wonderful collection of satiric and humorous essays on the law.
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