John Grisham

What's the difference between a lawyer and a hooker? A hooker'll stop screwing you when you're dead.

How do you know when a lawyer is lying? When his lips are moving.

In my first year of law school everybody loved everybody else, 'cause we were all studying the law, and the law was a noble thing. By my third year you were lucky if you weren't murdered in your sleep. People stole exams, hid research materials from the library, and lied to the professors. Such is the nature of the profession.

My dad hated lawyers. You might think I became one just to piss him off, but you'd be wrong. Did piss him off so much though that when he heard he fell off a ladder and didn't know who to sue first.

There's gotta be a hundred years of law experience sitting at this very table. My staff has flunked the bar exam six times.

Sworn in by a fool and vouched for by a scoundrel. I'm a lawyer at last.

My father hated lawyers all his life. He wasn't a great guy, my old man. He drank and beat up my mother; he beat me up too. So you might think I became a lawyer just to piss him off. But you'd be wrong. I wanted to be a lawyer ever since I read about the Civil Rights lawyers in the 50s and 60s, and the amazing uses they found for the law. They did what a lot of people thought was the impossible. They gave lawyers a good name. And so I went to law school. And it did piss my father off - he was pissed off anyway.

I knew exactly what was going on here. Just like when Daddy was in the bedroom crying and Mommy was sitting in the kitchen, face all bloody, saying that Daddy was sorry.

I'm hot. In fact, I'm so hot, there's no place for me to go but down. Every client I ever have will expect the same magic, nothing less. I could probably give it to them, if it didn't matter how I did it. Then I'd wake up one morning and find that I'd become Leo Drummond

Half an hour ago her husband came in and threw a bowl of soup at her, because she just didn't get how much he loved her.

Every lawyer, at least once in every case, feels himself crossing a line that he doesn't really mean to cross. It just happens, and if you cross it enough times it disappears forever. And then you're nothing but another lawyer joke, just another shark in the dirty water.

A lawyer's not supposed to become personally involved with his clients. but there's all kinds of lawyers. and all kinds of clients, too.

You think your average juror is King Solomon? No, he's a roofer with a mortgage. He wants to go home and sit in his Barcalounger and let the cable TV wash over him. And this man doesn't give a single, solitary droplet of shit about truth, justice or your American way.

Gentlemen, trials are too important to be left up to juries.

..the thing of it is, I don't give a shit. What's more… I never have.

Somebody add "class-clown" to Mr. Easter's ever expanding resume.

What do you hope to achieve if you win? You gonna bring Jacob Wood back to life? No. You just ensure that his wife goes to the cemetery in a better car, and that the heel that she snaps on the way to the graveside belongs to a $1,200 shoe. You get your name in the paper. But Jacob Wood and all the other gun violence victims remain rotting in their crypts.

"Easter." Correct... I didn't see you coming. Ovbiously I, uh, underestimated you. And as a rule, I don't do that. Make damn sure... you don't underestimate me.

I want to tell you a story. I'm going to ask you all to close your eyes while I tell you the story. I want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to yourselves. Go ahead. Close your eyes, please. This is a story about a little girl walking home from the grocery store one sunny afternoon. I want you to picture this little girl. Suddenly a truck races up. Two men jump out and grab her. They drag her into a nearby field and they tie her up and they rip her clothes from her body. Now they climb on. First one, then the other, raping her, shattering everything innocent and pure with a vicious thrust in a fog of drunken breath and sweat. And when they're done, after they've killed her tiny womb, murdered any chance for her to have children, to have life beyond her own, they decide to use her for target practice. They start throwing full beer cans at her. They throw them so hard that it tears the flesh all the way to her bones. Then they urinate on her. Now comes the hanging. They have a rope. They tie a noose. Imagine the noose going tight around her neck and with a sudden blinding jerk she's pulled into the air and her feet and legs go kicking. They don't find the ground. The hanging branch isn't strong enough. It snaps and she falls back to the earth. So they pick her up, throw her in the back of the truck and drive out to Foggy Creek Bridge. Pitch her over the edge. And she drops some thirty feet down to the creek bottom below. Can you see her? Her raped, beaten, broken body soaked in their urine, soaked in their semen, soaked in her blood, left to die. Can you see her? I want you to picture that little girl. Now imagine she's white.

We're going to lose this case, Carl Lee. There are no more points of law to argue here. I want to cope a plea, maybe Buckley will cop us a second degree murder and we can get you just life in prison.

It's not me, we're not the same, Carl Lee. The jury has to identify with the defendant. They see you, they see a yardworker; they see me, they see an attorney. I live in town, you live in the hill.

And until we can see each other as equals, justice is never going to be even-handed. It will remain nothing more than a reflection of our own prejudices.