‘Let’s Kill All the Lawyers’
By Robert Don Gifford

Ol’ Billy was right, let’s kill all the lawyers, kill’em tonight… — The Eagles

When the great Bard (Shakespeare, not Glen Frey or Don Henley) immortalized those words in Henry VI, it became one of the more popular pejoratives ever flung at the legal profession. It has become a rallying cry, punch line, and well-worn cliché now found on coffee mugs, t-shirts, and even as tattoos on Hell’s Angels. What many who invoke Shakespeare’s dictum fail to grasp is this particular quote is not so much a shot at lawyers, as a poignant observation of what we do on a daily basis. A cursory review of this in the proper context reveals it as homage to our noble profession as a vital cog in the machinery of a free society, and statement of the inherent conflict between the rule of law and pure anarchy.

The phrase is from one of the 10 plays commonly referred to as The Histories, and buried in Part II of the fourth act. The son of the popular Henry V, the legacy of Henry VI was the bloody War of the Roses, and involves his efforts to retain his monarchy. Throughout its three parts, the King is beleaguered by troubles that include an ambititious Duke of York, murders of the Dukes of Gloucester and Suffolk, as well as a peasant uprising led by protagonist Jack Cade - who makes a farfetched claim to the throne believing to be a descendant of King Edward III. It should be noted that the peasant uprising is historically based with an uprising in 1450 in which 30,000 peasants seeking land reform marched on London that became known as “Cade’s Rebellion”

The infamous quote arises from one of Cade’s henchmen, Dick the Butcher, as the rebels marched onto London:

CADE: Be brave, for your captain is brave and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny, the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it felony to drink small beer. All the realm shall be in common, and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass. And when I am king, as king I will be…

CADE’S FOLLOWERS: God save your majesty!

CADE: I thank you good people! … there shall be no money. All shall eat and drink my score, and I will apparel them all in one livery that they may agree like brothers and worship me their lord.

DICK THE BUTCHER: The first thing we do let’s kill all the lawyers.

CADE: Nay, that I mean to do. Is this not a lamentable thing that the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings, but I say ‘tis the bee’s wax. For I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.

Read in context, it is clear that Shakespeare, the son of a Stratford alderman and justice of the peace, did not purport that lawyers symbolize the forces of evil. In allowing Dick the Butcher to state as much, Shakespeare implicitly acknowledges the lawyer’s valuable role in a just society and any tyrant seeking to eliminate freedoms would first want to “kill all the lawyers.” Thus an end to good order and rule of civilized society.

As members of our noble profession, you are now armed with the truth of context. Correct this with a retort of even more Shakespeare that truly captures the spirit of our chosen occupation found in the Taming of the Shrew to “do as adversaries do in law – Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.” What Dick the Butcher proposed was not a world without lawyers, but anarchy by eliminating the rule of law and government. As noted by Justice Stevens in Walters v. National Association of Radiation Survivors, 105 S.Ct. 3180, 3215 (1985), the rebel’s proclamation was made “not by a friend of liberty.”