Snarf. Growl. Meow?
A Times EditorialPublished November 20, 2005
After very long thought and utterly serious deliberation, the Florida Supreme Court has unanimously pronounced pit bulls to be very bad dogs. Much too bad, you see, to symbolize a lawyer's services.
We are not making this up, but we wish we were.
The reason why the court scoured law books and the Internet for precedents, having none of its own, had nothing to do with injury to a person or another animal. The harm in question was only to the dignity of the legal profession, which obviously takes itself much too seriously.
The real harm, however, was to the First Amendment, which was diminished when the court ordered two Fort Lauderdale lawyers to be reprimanded and attend the Florida Bar's goody-two-shoes advertising workshop. Their offense was an advertisement featuring a pit bull with a spiked collar and their telephone number, 1-800-PIT-BULL.
A referee found that the ad harmlessly symbolized "loyalty, persistence, tenacity and aggressiveness," and that to censor it would infringe upon the lawyers' freedom of speech. But the court concluded that those were "a charitable set of associations that ignores the darker side of the qualities often also associated with pit bulls: malevolence, viciousness, and unpredictability."
If it were to uphold the referee's recommendations, the court fretted, "images of sharks, wolves, crocodiles and and piranhas could follow."
The court could not possibly have been unaware that there are already people who see lawyers as sharks, wolves, crocodiles and piranhas, not to mention pit bulls or worse? (These people tend to be known as defendants.) But the court is kidding only itself if it thinks that censoring the profession's advertising will make lawyers look like pussycats to the people who have felt their claws.