Justice & Law Quote by John Mortimer

Mortimer’s line lands like a courtroom aside delivered just loudly enough for the jury to hear. “No brilliance” isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-pretension: a jab at the myth of the law as a cathedral of genius, where dazzling minds produce justice by sheer IQ. He swaps that fantasy for two homely virtues: “common sense” and “relatively clean finger nails.” The first demotes legal reasoning from Olympian logic to ordinary human judgment; the second yanks the profession down into the realm of bodies, habits, and small moral tells.

The phrase “relatively” is doing sly work. It concedes that lawyers inevitably get their hands dirty - morally, socially, maybe even literally in the messy business of human conflict - but insists there’s a line between proximity to grime and becoming grime. Mortimer’s humor is defensive and diagnostic at once: the legal system is an apparatus of power, and power loves the costume of “brilliance” because it excuses cruelty, delay, and self-regard as sophistication. Clean nails, by contrast, are a metonym for decency you can check at close range.

Context matters: Mortimer wrote as a novelist steeped in barrister culture (and famous for skewering it through comic observation). Postwar British professional life prized polish and pedigree; Mortimer punctures that with an almost proletarian ethic of competence. The intent isn’t to lower standards. It’s to remind you the law’s real test is whether it can stay sane, practical, and faintly honorable while wading through other people’s worst days.