Wealth & Money Quote by Gerry Spence

Spence’s line lands like a courtroom one-liner, but it’s really a manifesto about who gets to be seen as “worthy” inside the legal system. The joke hinges on reversal: a lawyer, stereotypically willing to defend anyone, draws a bright moral line at the one figure American culture has decided least deserves empathy. “Banker” isn’t just an occupation here; it’s a symbol for institutional power that can harm at scale while staying clean, suit-and-tie respectable.

The specific intent is branding as much as ethics. Spence built a public identity as the people’s advocate, the trial lawyer who speaks human, not corporate. Refusing to represent bankers signals allegiance: he’s not neutral, he’s partisan for the powerless. It’s also a dig at the legal profession’s coziness with finance. If the law is supposed to check concentrated power, then representing that power can feel less like advocacy and more like laundering legitimacy.

Subtext: some clients don’t want a defense so much as a shield. Spence is implying that banking, as an industry, routinely externalizes risk and privatizes reward, then hires excellent lawyers when the bill comes due. The line is funny because it’s blunt, and bluntness is persuasive; it converts a complicated critique of political economy into a clean moral posture.

Context matters, too. Spence came of age in an era when “big money” became synonymous with faceless harm, and that suspicion only deepened after deregulation and the financial crises that followed. The banker, in this framing, is the perfect antagonist: powerful enough to buy the system, boring enough to be believable.