Lawyers: A Guilty Secret

Harvard professor (and Supreme Court justice) Joseph Story lets out a scandalous truth about practicing law--you don't have to be all that smart:

Whoever advances for safety must advance slowly. He must cautiously follow the old guides, and toil on with steady footsteps; for the old paths, through well beaten, are rugged; and the new paths, though broad, are still perplexed. To drop all metaphor, the law is a science in which there is no substitute for diligence and labor. It is a fine remark of one, who is himself a brilliant example of all he teaches, that "It appears to be the general order of Providence, manifested in the construction of our nature, that every thing valuable in human acquisition should be the result of toil and labor." But this truth is nowhere more forcibly manifested than in the law. Here, moderate talents with unbroken industry have often attained a victory over superior genius, and cast into shade the bright natural parts.

--Joseph Story, A Discourse Pronounced Upon the Inauguration of the Author,
As Dane Professor of Law in Harvard University (1829)

Found this in a bin full of old notes. The internal quotation comes from his peer Chancellor James Kent.

Meta note: The Kent reference was not in my notes. I found it in a nanosecond in Google Books, via Google Search here.