Our legal system shifts to the Soviet mode
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i can’t breathe!
Back in the day, law students were taught that John Adam’s defense of the British soldiers charged at the Aston Massacre was the hallmark of legal ethics and responsibility. Adams risked his reputation, even his life to represent a despised group of armed occupiers because that’s what lawyers were supposed to do; the accused are entitled to a defense, no matter how heinous the crime, no matter how the strong the evidence of guilt. That was then. Now, the lawyers at the ACLU have stopped defending the free speech rights of Nazis and other purveyors of “hate speech”, and defense lawyers claim that the choice of providing a defenses is a moral one, and lawyers should be judged on the basis of whom they choose to represent.
Okay, but if the legal profession declares that representing the “wrong type” of client is immoral, will it disbar those who do, just as it does those who commit other immoral acts? If not, why not? Discuss: 15 minutes, one side of page only.
WHEN BIG FIRMS REPRESENTED AL QAEDA TERRORISTS, we were told that everyone has a right to representation.
Yet big firms were bullied into dropping Trump as a client, none of them appear to be offering pro bono representation to the January 6 defendants, and now we see this: Harvard, Yale, And Stanford Law Students And Faculty Pressure U.S. Law Firms To Cut Ties With Russian Clients.
So given that lawyers apparently are morally responsible for their choice of clients, I think it’s fair to criticize Ketanji Brown Jackson for representating accused terrorists.
