The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers is a line from Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI that Richard Dawkins recalls in a discussion of cooperation and conflict. Rather than advocating its literal remedy, he uses the line as a darkly comic interlude before considering how legal rules can make an otherwise cooperative divorce adversarial—and how reform, rather than violence, might change that outcome.

The Shakespearean allusion

Dawkins introduces the line after explaining that Prisoner’s Dilemma is a nonzero-sum game: unlike chess, it allows two players to cooperate and share gains from a banker. The image of laughing together on the way to the bank prompts the recollection. The Shakespearean sentence appears on its own, followed by its attribution to 2 Henry VI, giving the allusion the abruptness of a punchline.

Its placement matters. The line sounds like a proposal to eliminate lawyers, but the surrounding argument turns toward institutional incentives and rules. The joke opens a passage about how conflict can be organized in ways that benefit intermediaries while imposing costs on the people whose dispute is at stake.

From adversarial rules to mutual costs

Dawkins uses divorce as a case in which a dispute need not be wholly zero-sum. Even after a marriage breaks down, a couple may have reasons to cooperate, including child welfare and the expense of legal representation. Yet, he says, in England and, until recently, in all fifty states of the United States, a lawyer’s professional code required a lawyer to accept only one member of a couple as a client. The other person had to seek separate advice or proceed without it.

That separation encourages an adversarial framing. The lawyers speak in terms of “us” and “them,” and the case is listed as “Smith versus Smith,” whether or not the couple themselves want an amicable resolution. In Dawkins’s account, the clients are pushed into a zero-sum contest while their lawyers occupy a different position: their fees are drawn from the couple’s shared resources, and prolonged disagreement can increase the bill.

The mechanism does not require the lawyers to conspire or even to understand their combined effect. Dawkins describes them as following well-established professional rules: each makes proposals the other knows will be rejected, receives a counterproposal, and generates further correspondence and calls. Their formal separation can thus sustain practical cooperation between the professionals, while the clients bear the costs. The Shakespearean line’s apparent target is redirected toward a system that can make conflict profitable without anyone explicitly organizing it.

The remedy behind the joke

Dawkins calls the Shakespearean option messy and proposes changing the law instead. He notes that many parliamentarians come from the legal profession and characterizes the British House of Commons as highly adversarial. He contrasts that atmosphere with the courts’ formal courtesies, observing that lawyers can maintain civility toward one another while their clients’ dispute remains costly.

Game theory offers a way to see the alternative: the couple’s conflict can sometimes be treated as a nonzero-sum problem in which cooperation produces benefits for both. Dawkins also qualifies his criticism by noting that some lawyers do the opposite of escalating a fight: they persuade clients eager for a zero-sum contest to settle out of court. The expression therefore serves not as the passage’s conclusion but as its sharpest joke, framing a question about institutions and incentives whose practical answer is reform and cooperation.