Gerry Spence Quotes

In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing.

I was attracted to law school because I believed it would help me prepare for a career in the real world.

I had no plans to be ever a lawyer, a crime fighter [in school].

We learned after the first semester in law school that it's best never to discuss exams. If notes are compared afterwards, you become painfully aware of things you missed.

Experience takes dreadfully high school-wages, but he teaches like no other.

Every Indian kid has access to MySpace and Facebook. But that doesn't mean they have access to books and great teachers. This idea about bringing digital tech into schools is great, but once again I'll say that this is not how people actually learn.

Yale Law School was the kind of place you went if you felt you needed to go to law school, maybe, for your resume, but you really didn't want to practice law. You wanted to do public policy, or maybe go into politics.

Doctors and lawyers must go to school for years and years, often with little sleep and with great sacrifice to their first wives.

True teaching cannot be learned from text-books any more than a surgeon can acquire his skill by reading about surgery.

When I was in law school I was taught that the great writers were people like [Oliver Wendell] Holmes Jr. and [Benjamin N.] Cardozo. But you go back and read their prose and it's sort of perfumed and very ornate and show-offy. And they're constantly striving for these abstractions that seem archaic nowadays.

If you wish to be a lawyer, attach no consequence to the place you are in, or the person you are with; but get books, sit down anywhere, and go to reading for yourself. That will make a lawyer of you quicker than any other way.

When I went to law school, nobody heard of civil rights.

I can tell you about Hillary Clinton's heart. This is a woman, who, after law school, went down to my native South. She went down, after graduating from Yale Law School, to help poor kids, to help disabled kids.

We must begin to train lawyers the minute they walk into law school to tell the truth. They must immediately begin to learn the business of representing people. They must be assigned cases the first day.

She was pondering the option of law school, the great American baby-sitter for directionless postgrads.

I was in the top ten percent of my law school class. I am a Doctor of Juris Prudence. I have an honorary Doctor of Laws. So, would somebody please tell me why I spent four mortal hours today conversing with a person named Dizzy Dean.

There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.

I am absent altogether too much to be a suitable instructor for a law-student. When a man has reached the age that Mr. Widner has,and has already been doing for himself, my judgment is, that he reads the books for himself without an instructor. That is precisely the way I came to the law.

I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.

I'm always telling my students go to law school or become a doctor, do something, and then write. First of all you should have something to write about, and you only have something to write about if you do something.

The worst letters come from retired high school English teachers. They will literally take a book and pick it to pieces and send me 14 pages of notes.

I just read everything I could get my hands on. I taught myself to read or my mother taught me. Who knows how I learned to read? It was before I went to school, so I would go to the library and just take things off the shelf. My mother had to sign a piece of paper saying I could take adult books.

I am not one to generalize, but cartoonists, as a group, exhibit a level of social sophistication generally associated with pie fights. In high school, when the future lawyers were campaigning for class president, the future cartoonists were painstakingly altering illustrations in their history books so that Robert E. Lee appeared to be performing an illegal act with his horse.

The subordinate's job is not to reform or reeducate the boss, not to make him conform to what the business schools or the management book say bosses should be like. It is to enable a particular boss to perform as a unique individual.

School was a source of great suffering to me, but once I learned to read, I disappeared into books, where I was a happy visitor to all the worlds that sprang full-blown from the printed page.