The Legal Profession
The Bar commonly refers to the legal profession as a whole. With a modifier, it may refer to a branch or division of the profession: as for instance, the tort bar, lawyers who specialize in filing civil suits for damages.
In conjunction with bench, bar may differentiate lawyers who represent clients (the bar), from judges or members of a judiciary (the bench). In this sense, the bar advocates and the bench adjudicates. Yet, judges commonly remain members of the bar; and lawyers are commonly referenced as Officers of the Court.
The phrase bench and bar denotes all judges and lawyers collectively.
Read more about this topic: Bar (law)
Famous quotes containing the words legal and/or profession:
“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“The actors today really need the whip hand. They’re so lazy. They haven’t got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)