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:
“The disfranchisement of a single legal elector by fraud or intimidation is a crime too grave to be regarded lightly.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)