Lawyers, Damn Lawyers, and Alan

For I tell you that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

  Matthew 5:20 (English Standard Version)

What’s brown and looks good on a lawyer? A Doberman!

Of all the professions that require extensive training and elaborate education, lawyers are probably the least respected by the Average American. They’re right up there with college professors. Lawyers, as a group, just have a lousy reputation. Even Jesus thought so (scribes and Pharisees were members of society in his time who were deeply invested in holding up the law).

Most people are suspicious of lawyers…until they need one, which happens a lot. And I suspect that many people in need of legal services shrug their shoulders and bow to the necessity, while holding their noses: Modern society is saturated with law and legal strictures, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Imagine American society without the laws to protect individuals from the predations of businesses and other individuals. Imagine the environment, without laws. If you look at American society today, with its violence and shortsightedness and crass materialism, it’s frightening, actually, to think of having no legal boundaries at all, far worse than the prospect of occasionally having to hire a lawyer to protect you.

Now there are lawyers and lawyers, and they are not all cut from the same cloth. There are some (not enough, in my opinion) who eschew the high-profile tracks in the profession and instead represent people who really, really need help, who need someone to stand up for them when no one else will. Such women and men are, in my opinion, people of noble character and deserve every bit of the respect that their education and training merit, and more. I have known a few people like this in my day: defending workers taken advantage of by large corporations, standing up for immigrants in the face of the security state, challenging companies who break environmental protection laws, and so on.

Other lawyers, for whatever reason and by whatever means, exist to serve other interests — protecting estates, property rights cases, personal injury lawsuits, defamation, and so on. These people are not necessarily bad, nor even unprincipled. But while they have been hired to create a legal argument on behalf of their clients, they do not necessarily agree with that argument, nor even with their clients. Their job is to make the case, regardless of their own feelings about the people involved.

And I suspect that this is one reason why so many people revile lawyers and make sardonic jokes about them: In the end, you never really know where such lawyers stand personally. You cannot gauge their real, moral center merely by what they say in the brief or in court. Like actors in Elizabethan times, who were regarded as lowlife creatures by proper society because their job was to pretend to be someone else, lawyers in modern society have an obligation to do and say things that may sound unconscionable…or at least morally questionable…without suffering any consequences. Everyone understands that they are, well, just hired guns.

So if lawyers are the unquestionably Good Guys defending the defenseless, these are damn lawyers, as in “I need a damn lawyer.”

But there is yet another class of lawyers, one whose words and deeds go beyond the “moral neutrality” of the damn lawyer to embrace the truly pernicious. Whatever their personal principles (if any), they are prepared to defend their clients with utterly indefensible arguments, for a fee. They skulk behind the screen of the damn lawyer’s professionalism, but in fact such creatures exist merely to profit, personally and financially, from making hay out of horse shit, and they truly do not care what the real consequences of their arguments will be. If they did, they would never make them.

Some hay

If they really cared, if they really had a soul, if they actually were willing to take responsibility, they would never say or do the things they do in their work. In a sense, you can indeed gauge the moral compass of such people, because if they had a moral center, they would never be caught dead saying some of the things they say. 

Who knows? Maybe they even actually agree with the arguments they are making. But one thing is certain: They like the money better than they hate the consequences of their arguments. They will tell you that they are taking those six- and seven-figure fees because “everyone is entitled to representation.”

Some horse shit

But think about it, for a second. Is that really true? Is it really true that everyone deserves representation, at any cost, by any argument at all? Are we really prepared to absolve such men and women of responsibility for making dangerous and irresponsible arguments…just because they are lawyers? Is there nothing that is out of bounds, no argument that is so pernicious that it should not be seriously entertained in a formal setting?

Well, consider then the following statements from one such “lawyer”:

Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest…And if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment. 

Impeachment. Not removal from office. Impeachment. This statement was made on the floor of the US Senate in response to a question from a senator. 

This lawyer is suggesting that the POTUS can reasonably conclude that his actions are, by definition, in the public interest, and therefore cannot even be called to question for acting entirely to his own advantage and profit, regardless of the opinions of, say, members of the other branches of the government. 

The implications, the consequences, of such an argument are breathtaking. It is literally the same as saying that the POTUS is in fact a king, who is free to see no distinction between himself and the government he was elected to administer. L’état, c’est lui!

Now the lawyer who said this is not stupid. He is a highly-educated man who has built a very profitable career out of being seen as smart and clever. He did not get where he is today by not understanding what his own words mean. He must surely have known that this argument is literally an invitation to dictatorship.

But at the same time, it is probable that this lawyer himself does not actually believe this argument. Anyway, he is now desperately trying to walk it back.

No, this was red meat, a cynical, one-off defense of indefensible behavior, tossed out to see if it “sticks,” but also subject to “retraction” and other kinds of obfuscation if it does not. It is thus, not a measure of this man’s “professionalism” but of the emptiness that is his soul, the hollowed-out carcass of whatever moral center he was raised with. He will quite literally say anything to defend his client, no matter how pernicious.

* Picture credits:  hayandforage.com, ft.com