What’s Up With the Epigraph?

“Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.” – Charles Lamb

First off, it’s from an essay by Charles Lamb, an English writer in the late-18th and early-19th century. But what does it mean? Everyone was a child once, right? So why act like it’s strange that this fairly obvious fact is also true about lawyers?

Well, there is the time-honored tradition of making fun of lawyers as not quite human (even Shakespeare got in on that fun). More to the point, lawyers can seem the opposite of children: while kids are innocent and say just what they feel (no matter how embarrassing), lawyers plot and scheme and say whatever they need to in order to win their case (or so the stereotype goes). Linking lawyers to children suggests these two opposites perhaps aren’t so different after all, and reminds us that lawyers really are people just like everyone else.