From the Richmond Dispatch, 3/20/1862, p. 2, c. 4

Pettifoggers. – Richmond, like many other cities of similar size and pretensions to respectability, is not entirely exempt from the presence of a lot of pettifogging, two-cent lawyers, who are seen usually in all their peculiar glory in the lower courts, the advocates of dubious and uncertain rights, and who as such obtain from the follies, vices, and crimes of their fellows the means of a precarious subsistence, and who, entirely innocent of law, give birth to the most astounding legal propositions, the coinage of their own ingenius heads. Unluckily the Bill of Rights, Constitution, or some other paper, has given these gentry a sort of constructive right to badger witnesses, and bore courts and juries to a degree that would seem insufferable to ordinary comprehension. It seems a pity that Gen. Winder did not have the power to draft into the army some of the hundreds of worthless characters now in this city. Were the legal limbs included in such a conscription, we are sure that the Commanding General would see at once the propriety of putting them in the front ranks as dangerous weapons. If as dangerous to the enemy as they are to their clients, they would soon kill them off.

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