ambulance chaser

[James A. Landau]

 On Sat, 6 Mar 2004 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:

>    If Fred Shapiro of Yale Law School finds "ambulance chaser" in 1496,
> I'll eat the beer can in "beer can chicken."

1496 would be a good trick, since the OED dates "ambulance" in the sense of a
single vehicle only from 1854.

A lawyer once told me that she was dating a hospital administrator.  "My
parents are in favor of the match.  I'll be the only lawyer with my own fleet of
ambulances to chase!"

Seriously, if you are interested in legal antedatings of the late 19th/early
20th century (I'm not), one place to look is "The Green Bag", which from 1889
to 1914 pablished articles that "make an argument that merits more than a
letter to the editor but fewer than fifty footnotes."  I don't know if it has been
placed on-line.  It has recently been resurrected, see www.greenbag.org

Worth quoting:  "Green Bag law review. The review just reached its fifth
anniversary, at least in its revivedstate. It was born in 1889, but stopped
publishing in 1914, and took its name from the green satchels that lawyers from
Daniel Webster on into the last century used to carry. It also was a pejorative
name for lawyers, roughly equivalent to “ambulance chaser” today."


(http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:zuslaDOo7bsJ:www.gmu.edu/departments/law/currnews/wry-turn.pdf+%2B%22The+green+bag%22%2Bambulance&hl=en&ie=UTF-8)

Aside to Barry Popik: your citation of "Beltway bandit" is for a different
sense than the usual one "consultant to the Federal Government", so-called
because a large number of such consulting companies have offices in communities
along the Washington Beltway, particularly in and around Maclean VA and Greenbelt
MD.

      - James A. Landau (former Beltway bandit)