Q: Why won’t sharks attack lawyers?

A: Personal courtesy.

That kind of joke is the research subject matter for Marc Galanter, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who will speak this week on the Kansas University campus.

Galanter, author of “Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture,” will speak at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Hall Center for the Humanities.

A review of his book in the Philadelphia Inquirer called it “hilarious and philosophical at the same time : a nifty probe of the genre.”

The event, titled “Learning from Lawyer Jokes,” is free and open to the public.