(1) While the law asserts otherwise, Truth's activism demonstrates the capacity of disfranchised Americans to seize legal agency, to demand a voice u2018among the pettifoggers .u2019(2) Thus women could practice law in some areas or cases at the level of amateur pettifoggers , a situation that led some western observers to believe that the Russian legal profession was much more open to women than it was.(3) Ames's tavern sign, then, plays on the tension between lawyers with formal legal training like Dudley, and village tavern keepers and pettifoggers like Ames himself.(4) In such an argument there would always be matter for answers, rejoinders, replications, triplications, quadruplications, and that infinite web of disputes that our pettifoggers have spun out as far as they could in favor of lawsuits.
