Read on Twitter
Every lawyer, judge, law professor, & law student should read this great piece by @pareene on the “moral rot in the legal community” that insulates lawyers from repercussions for taking even the most repugnant actions on their clients' behalf ... https://twitter.com/pareene/status/1336316434012463104
This topic is especially timely given last week’s SCOTUS hearing where high-profile "liberal" “Democrat” Neal Katyal argued not only that his client Nestle should be immune from suits by children claiming the company abetted their enslavement to work in its overseas plantations,
... but also that all U.S. corporations should be immune from similar suits.
As @pareene explains, such a repulsive argument having been made by such a high-profile “liberal” “Democrat” was a telling demonstration of how the sacred right of a criminal defendant to the assistance of counsel has been so successfully co-opted by corporate lawyers that ...
... the whole concept of attorneys having a special duty to the public “to serve the interests of justice, not just the interests of the client,” has been obliterated.
Now we’re in a place where anything a lawyer does is morally and socially acceptable as long as its in the name of a client ...
... with the entire profession and academy having “closed ranks around this highly ideological understanding of professionalism and independence that happens to support the right of an attorney to make a fortune” at the expense of the most basic notions of justice and humanity.
I’m sure that all of my colleagues working in the courts for ordinary people can come up with compelling examples of the way this increasingly rotten culture increasingly allows for corporate litigants as well as, unfortunately, judges ...
... (whose ability to obtain and keep office is increasingly dependent on support from corporate cash) to “either pretend power dynamics do not exist or obfuscate how they work in the real world.”
I was especially dismayed at a recent meeting of the local Inn of Court of which I’m a member, where a retired Jones Day partner offered a lecture on “professionalism” to a room full of some of the most distinguished attorneys and judges in Ohio, including a Supreme Court justice
In this lecture, this attorney effectively congratulated himself for having dedicated 10% of his career to public service work, and encouraged us all to do the same, as if that would sanitize whatever we did with the other 90%.
I know this lawyer is largely a product of the culture he came up in (as much as influence as this lawyer, especially, was in a position to have over that culture) ...
... but it is critical that we wake up to the fact that this culture—which allowed this lawyer to publicly congratulate himself for dedicating 10% of his time to public service—is rotten and needs to change.
It’s easy enough to see how we got here, esp. in the context of the post-Civil Rights-era corporate counterrevolution that’s resulted in the large-scale abandonment over the last 50 years of once fundamental restraints on corporate power that underpinned the previous 100 years...
See, e.g., Teddy Roosevelt’s face on Mount Rushmore, not to mention his speech at Ohio’s Constitutional Convention of 1912 ...
And while it’s of course much harder to see how we fix this problem, a good start would surely be to get back to understanding that all lawyers do have a public responsibility to serve the interests of justice ...
... and that the cases lawyers choose to take, the arguments they choose to make, and the firms they choose to work for, all speak to their values and morality.
The point isn't that corporations in themselves are bad (as much as the outsized influence corporate power has on our government and lives surely is), or that lawyering for corporations in itself is bad (as much as far too much of it is) ...
Someone has to do it, people need to make a living, and some even manage, at least at times, against increasingly unfavorable odds, to do this work in a way that does uphold the public's interest.
The problem, again, is with the now dominant idea that a lawyer is somehow morally excused for doing anything whatsoever as long as it’s done on behalf of a client—e.g., Katyal’s defense of child slavery on behalf of Nestle.
A lot of good would come if we could be honest about the repugnance of this idea, not to mention the manner in which it has been self-interestedly advanced by corporate mouthpieces.
