Joel P. Trachtman Quotes

“A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.”

“Abraham Lincoln, a great lawyer as well as a great President, was fond of asking, “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?”

When his victim would innocently answer “five,” he would reply that the victim had it wrong: “Calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg”.”

“Allowing societies to overcome cooperation problems so that they can create public goods or prevent individuals from doing harm to one another. Law is essential to our character as a social animal and to humanity’s ability to improve its welfare.”

“Although a legal system is rooted in the values of its society, it also has an independent dynamic, with principles, language, and rules of its own.”

“Argue for Procedural Benefit: To Win on Substance, Maximize Your Procedural Advantage Good lawyers, like good athletes, know that small sources of advantage are important. Each of those small sources of advantage makes our chances of winning greater, and if there are a lot of them, they make our chances of winning much greater.”

“As I have stressed repeatedly, the law, like other rules, is by its nature incomplete. Within the legal system, we use the mechanism of interpretation, often carried out by courts, to complete it in particular cases — to determine how to apply it to particular cases.

In order to apply the law consistently, it must be interpreted consistently. Incompleteness is a problem not just of statutes and contracts, but also of the common law. Indeed, we can understand the common law as a mechanism for incremental decentralized completion of incomplete legal rules.”

“By complying with the law, you will avoid the costly application of the force of the state.”

“Common law systems have long had a rule that secondary sources would not be accepted as evidence where primary sources are readily available.”

“Don’t try arguing to someone to whom you are romantically attracted that you have a right to their reciprocal affection, or that they bear the burden of proving that you are not attractive to them.”

“Ethical argument addresses the question of what should be, or what we should do, while legal argument generally addresses a wholly different question.”

“Even the appearance of bias is sufficient to result in a requirement that a judge recuse himself — withdraw — from hearing the case.”

“Facts can be appreciated in different ways, and support for a proposition is often in the eye of the beholder.”

“Human beings, more than we’d like to admit, reach conclusions first and analyze later.”

“I must concede that I only learned most of what this book contains after law school.”

“If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”

“Imagine a primitive group of village elders faced with a problem or a dispute. Anthropologists report that they will often turn to precedent — how did we deal with this last time? — in order to determine how to deal with it this time.

This is one of the reasons elders have these decision-making roles — they have greater knowledge of precedent than the younger generation. The wisdom of elders is, in part, based on experience.”

“In a legal system, a legislator determines which elements are required, while a court determines whether each element is present.”

“In general terms, we can say that lawyers analyze and argue about what the rules are and how they apply to particular situations.”

“It is important for you to know the protections available to you against harm to your person, your property, or your organization, and to be able to advocate for yourself in these regards.”

“It turns out that we as individuals and we as societies have many values, and there are often areas in which our values are inconsistent with one another. This is why the framing strategy discussed in the prior section is always available.

Moreover, when we make rules, we often fail to anticipate all the ways in which the values we seek to implement could conflict with other values and all the ways in which the rules made now could conflict with other rules made earlier or later.”

“Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, “the mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.”

“Knowledge of facts and knowledge of law.”

“Law is a central tool and structure of the state. In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2, Dick the Butcher, in connection with plans for a revolt, says, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

Dick sees the killing of lawyers as a way to destroy state authority (not, as is commonly thought, as a way to improve society more generally).”

“Law is important because it establishes the terms under which the state will apply its force—by which society has agreed through the state and the law how the coercive power of the state can be used.”

“Law, like taxes in the words of the great judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, is the price of civilization.”

“Laws (and contracts) are prepared in advance to control later behavior. Legislation is the mechanism by which societies agree in advance about what to do to prevent or affect specified behavior.”

“Lawyers are trained to think in terms of legal right and legal wrong (which is one of the things that people find objectionable about them).”

“Legal practice is, to a great extent, ethically ambivalent. Lawyers pledge to represent their clients zealously, and so they are charged, where their client is wrong, with trying to make the weaker argument appear the stronger.

Yet, they also see themselves as officers of the court, or agents of the state, and in that role they should seek to enforce the law as intended and must act honestly.”

“Mere legal rules can never hope to achieve more than an approximation of substantive justice.”

“Not just words, but words that carry the force of the state.”