Lawyers Doing Good in the Community
Abstract
Lawyers are not always cast in positive light. Often unfairly. One of William Shakespeare's most famous literacy lines is the sentence from Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2, which says: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers". Unlike the seeming suggestion that one should harbour murderous thoughts in the elimination of lawyers, the actual intention of the Bard is quite the opposite. As is often said, context is everything: The above words were uttered by Dick, a villainous character and the right-hand man of Jack Cade, who is leading a rebellion against King Henry. These two individuals are aggressively anti-intellectual – in that they killed anyone who can read and burnt all the books and documents they encountered. Their goal was simple: To take over an ignorant population with greater ease than one where everyone understands their rights.