From the Bin: Legal Ethics

Ah, this takes me back. I wrote (or do you say “coined” or maybe “tossed off”) this in the fall of ’93 when I was teaching at Penn Law School. One of my `colleagues talked the alumni bulletin into printing it, but then the dean got a look at it; his bowels turned to water and into the file it went, only to emerge today, blinking and bewildered.

I admit, I am probably not the first limerick-writer (limericist?) to rhyme “-adelphia” and “telfia.” Anyway:

A lawyer from old Philadlephia
Told his client, “the lies that I tellfia

Are venal, not vicious—
Whatever your wishes,

I surely will not hazard hellfia."

Thanks. Folks, I’ve got a million of ‘em.