The New Yorker Book of Lawyer Cartoons Paperback – January 3, 1996

This collection of cartoons is hilarious. If you know any attorneys, this makes a great gift or a coffee table book.

Have the book- love the book! Please note that the dimensions of this book are smaller than a normal book! Definitely not the size of "a passport" like someone wrote but it's about a little larger than one square foot. It's a book with cartoons on each page- how big do you need the book to be! This book is in my law office and I look at it a few times a year and have a chuckle. DEFINATELY a great gift for a litigator or lawyer.

I purchased this book for my friend who graduated from law school. I also received this book for my law school graduation. It's a great gift and fun to read through.

I'm surprised at how small this collection is. Attorneys are such an inviting target for comedic attacks that it amazes me that as long as the New Yorker has been around, it only found about 85 attorney cartoons worthy of collection into this 1993 edition and that it hasn't found enough worthy cartoons since then to fill out a second edition.Originality isn't a feature point of this New Yorker collection of cartoons, but talent is.The 85 attorney cartoons largely revolve around two themes. One is surrealistic art which makes attorneys look as uncharacteristically undignified as possible (many of which are variations on the old "shark" joke that shows attorneys in the open water with fins and teeth).The other is animated commentary on the ubiquitousness of attorneys in everyday life, a ubiquitousness that deprives each attorney of his individuality ("Would everyone check to see if they have an attorney?" asks a meeting-organizer. "I seem to have ended up with two.")As I say though, the talent of the cartoonists is great enough that the same joke can be replayed several times and still retain a certain amount of freshness each time.Still, the funniest cartoons are those which break the mold and display some actual knowledge about the profession such as the courtroom setting on the moon, in which judge, jury, and counsel are dutifully wearing spacesuits. The spaceships that transported them there are displayed in the background. "Not ANOTHER change of venue, counselor," the judge protests to one forceful advocate.But as for the garden-variety attorney jokes, to my mind as a member of the bar myself, the joke is always on the jokester.The public that enjoys these cartoons hates attorneys so much that they place their kids on an ever-increasing basis into law school and hire attorneys with the same frequency, expecting their own attorneys to engage in the same tactics that they would object to in anyone else's attorney. The public even hates attorneys enough to recently forgive an attorney who happened to be President of the United States for criminal and unethical conduct in a litigation setting.Sure, this collection has a funny wedding-cake cartoon, in which the plastic bride-and-groom at the top of the cake are both accompanied by their respective plastic lawyers. In a world in which the divorce rate approaches 50 percent and pre-nups are necessary legal insurance, the bride and groom have created the need for counsel.Sure, there's a cartoon in this collection that shows attorneys sold over the grocery counter in six-packs. Since 1993, at least one organization has taken to marketing legal services on a multi-level marketing basis in the same way that Amway or Herbalife market health products. Legal services ARE becoming like food, drink and health to the public.Who creates such demand? Who's responsible for the proliferation of attorneys? The cartoonists who lampoon us and the public who laughs at the lampoons; that is, you, me and all of us because we've created the demand for that which we outwardly disdain. And I have a feeling that the cartoonists themselves know this.It's OK to laugh at cleverly-delivered jokes ostensibly directed at the legal profession, but you'll probably enjoy the jokes more if you don't peer too closely to see if the joke isn't really on you.

I purchased this as a gift for an attorney and it was so insanely cute! The humor is dry but if you've ever known an attorney well, most of them enjoy dry humor! The quality is great and the images are clear.

I didn't realize how small this is. I guess I should have looked. It fits in the palm of my hand. It has one cartoon on each page. I wouldn't have gotten it had I realized what it was. But it was a fun gift for my favorite law student.

My son recently passed the New York Bar, loves the New Yorker magazine, so this was a perfect gift for him. The cartoons are cute and the book is well made. Would definitely recommend.

For any lover of the iconic cartoons from the New Yorker Magazine this is great. Was a little something for my daughter who is off to law school in August and of course she has grown up in a family who has been reading the New Yorker for 30 years! She really loved this. The seller was really fast to get this mailed, arrive sooner than expected!