Life & Wisdom Quote by Vincent Bugliosi

"Incidentally" is the tell: a throat-clear disguised as courtesy, a parenthetical that pretends to be offhand while doing tactical work. Bugliosi isn’t praising David Boies so much as preemptively narrowing the frame. By conceding competence up front, he insulates himself from the predictable charge that any criticism to follow is sour grapes or anti-celebrity-lawyer bias. It’s the courtroom move of granting a minor point to win the major one.

The subtext is sharper: Boies had become a brand, the high-gloss avatar of elite litigation culture (from Bush v. Gore to corporate defenses), and Bugliosi is signaling he won’t be dazzled. Calling him "a very fine lawyer" reads less like admiration than like placing a velvet rope around the discussion: yes, credentialed, yes, skilled, and that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is what that skill is deployed for, and what it buys in the public imagination.

Bugliosi’s context matters. As a prosecutor-turned-author who traded on moral clarity (Helter Skelter, and later political-legal polemics), he wrote with an ethic of consequence: law as an arena where outcomes are not abstract. The line functions as a small piece of reputational judo, acknowledging professional prowess while keeping the spotlight on larger questions of judgment and power. It’s a compliment with a fuse attached, the kind that cues readers: I’m about to argue that being "fine" at the craft doesn’t settle the case about the cause.