As a lawyer, I have to disagree on the first account and I don't propose to pass moral judgments on an entire class of people because they chose a particular path of education. As to the first account, most fraudsters do not have a law degree -- most fraudsters don't have the patience to wait and go through 4 years of undergrad, 3 years of law school (with the attendant expense now being approximately 45K a year just for tuition) and then have to pass the bar. It is much easier to just claim you are a lawyer and then defraud someone. As to philosophy and law, I do think that there are some similarities in that both try to teach one to question the accepted "TRUTH", especially when the evidence for it is all "I say, therefore it must be." Both try to teach one to ask questions, intelligent questions intended to get at both the facts and the truth of an issue, and how to reason in a logical fashion. Logic is an essential element in taking philosophy and IMHO should be in law, but it is not.
Well it was a joke but every joke has an element of truth. The reason I think there are a lot of lawyer fraudsters is I looked up on wikipedia and many, many convicted of fraud, bribery, financial crimes, etc are politicians (ex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…cians_convicted_of_crimes) And a great number of politicians started as lawyers. So by the transitive property of degrees, a higher than average percentage of fraudsters are lawyers, in the histogram of those who have degrees. I haven't actually calculated that histogram. Perhaps finance or some other major may have more? I don't know. I am not saying lawyers are all bad people, or none are great people, or they don't serve a useful purpose many times (ex patent attorneys).
Hey is this a good thread for lawyer jokes?