The Lawyers' trade is a trade built entirely on words. And so long as the lawyers carefully keep to themselves the key to what those words mean, the only way the average man can find out what is going on is to become a lawyer, or at least to study law, himself. All of which makes it very nice -- and very secure -- for the lawyers.

FRED RODELL, Woe Unto You, Lawyers

The Constitution is what the judges say it is, every time.

FRED RODELL, 55 Men: The Story of the Constitution

Long sentences, awkward constructions, and fuzzy-wuzzy words that seem to apologize for daring to venture an opinion are part of the price the law reviews pay for their precious dignity.

FRED RODELL, "Goodbye to Law Reviews," 23 Virginia Law Review 38-45, Nov. 1936

In tribal times, there were the medicine men. In the Middle Ages, there were the priests. Today, there are the lawyers. For every age, a group of bright boys, learned in their trades and jealous of their learning, who blend technical competence with plain and fancy hocus-pocus to make themselves masters of their fellow men. For every age, a pseudo-intellectual autocracy, guarding the tricks of the trade from the uninitiated, and running, after its own pattern, the civilization of its day.

FRED RODELL, Woe Unto You, Lawyers!

The centripetal absorption in the home-made mysteries and sleight-of-hand of the law would be a perfectly harmless occupation if it did not consume so much time and energy that might better be spent otherwise. And if it did not, incidentally, consume so much space in the law libraries. It seems never to have occurred to most of the studious gents who diddle around in the law reviews with the intricacies of contributory negligence, consideration, or covenants running with the land that neither life nor law can be confined within the forty-four corners of some cozy concept. It seems never to have occurred to them that they might be diddling while Rome burned.

FRED RODELL, "Goodbye to Law Reviews," 23 Virginia Law Review 38-45, Nov. 1936

Some people today have a strange notion. They think that all the Supreme Court ever does or has to do, in order to tell if a law is unconstitutional, is just to look for the answer, written down in black and white, somewhere in the words of the Constitution. The notion persists in spite of the fact that often and often again the nine judges themselves cannot agree. It persists in spite of the famous remark of the man whi is now the Court's chief justice--and few have put the truth so plainly as did Charles Evan Hughes--"We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is."

FRED RODELL, 55 Men: The Story of the Constitution

There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.

FRED RODELL, "Goodbye to Law Reviews," 23 Virginia Law Review 38-45, Nov. 1936

Exceptions to the traditions of dumpy dignity and fake learnedness in law review writing are as rare as they are beautiful. Once in a while a Thomas Reed Powell gets away with an imaginary judicial opinion that gives a real twist to the lion’s tail. Once in a while a Thurman Arnold forgets his footnotes as though to say that if people do not believe or understand him that is their worry and not his. But even such mild breaches of etiquette as these are tolerated gingerly and seldom, and are likely to be looked at a little askance by the writers’ more pious brethren.

FRED RODELL, "Goodbye to Law Reviews," 23 Virginia Law Review 38-45, Nov. 1936

It is a mistake to think of these men as visionary dreamers, playing around at Philadelphia with abstract conceptions of political theory, pulling a whole scheme of government out of the air like a rabbit out of a hat. True, many of them had read and studied enough about the science of politics to put the average statesman of today to shame. But political science was to them an extremely practical topic of discussion, dealing with the extremely practical business of running a government--not, as today, a branch of higher learning reserved for the use of graduate students.

FRED RODELL, 55 Men: The Story of the Constitution

The reason the lawyers lead the line to the guillotine or the firing squad is that, while law is supposed to be a device to serve society, a civilized way of helping the wheels go round without too much friction, it is pretty hard to find a group less concerned with serving society and more concerned with serving themselves than the lawyers.

FRED RODELL, "Goodbye to Law Reviews," 23 Virginia Law Review 38-45, Nov. 1936