Good Lawyers Represent Bad Clients

As I prepare to teach law students again, I realize that I believe in a principle that few if any non-lawyers accept. I try to instill in my students the same attitude: in return for the exclusive right to appear in court on behalf of causes we support, we have a responsibility from time to time also to advocate for a client for whom we find no favor. Our second American President, John Adams, did what no modern politician likely would when, as an attorney who was a leading private citizen, he was retained by British soldiers who had attacked the colonials. I admire that for the confidence in democratic rule of law.

In 1770, six years before the Revolution began in earnest, the redcoats fired on patriots in the "Boston Massacre." A half dozen persons were killed, including Crispus Attucks, who became the first casualty of the conflict that would lead to our independence. Adams accepted the assignment of defending the enemy, after others had refused to do so. He obtained acquittals for all on the charge of murder (two were convicted of a lesser offense, avoiding execution).

Depending on whether you were on his side, Adams was either honest or stubborn. He was an irascible, intemperate character, someone you would not imagine would pursue public life much less be successful at it. His wife, Abigail, was his equal as both acknowledged, and he likely would not have succeeded without her advice and counsel their daily letters during lengthy separations. His arch-rival, the more utopian Thomas Jefferson, became his great friend in another celebrated correspondence they carried on after each had defeated the other and retired.

The actions of Adams, and his colleagues, early in his career exemplified the concept at the core of lawyering as a service profession. That ideal is representation. A lawyer is not the same as his client. A lawyer need not even like his client.

The challenge is for the rest of us as observers. We say we wish to avoid guilt by association, but we respect that phrase in the breach if at all. When we are angry, individually or collectively, all we can see is what has made us angry. We have concluded an accused party is guilty before trial. We do not see the point of process. Perhaps that is the human nature that we temper through rules agreed upon in advance.

What we should appreciate are other values beyond the circumstances of the specific case in front of us. We have a short-term, perhaps self-interest, in the outcome in this instance. Yet we also have an abiding, shared interest, in the functioning of the system. It is especially the guilty party who needs a good lawyer. A finding of innocence in those celebrated trials shows there are considerations more important than the particulars. We will not abide discrimination, torture, or government overreach.

The above sentiments are hardly idiosyncratic to me. Among criminal defense lawyers it verges on cliche. They are accosted at dinner parties about how they can possibly do what they do. They can try to explain using their finest rhetoric.

The standard response, including from one's own family, is, "Yes, but why does it have to be you?"

My reply is as follows. A lawyer who argues for any principle he won't actually advance is indeed a lawyer whom we should not respect. If I say I care about the rule of law set forth in a system, I have to demonstrate that through sacrifice. It is self-evident that if all of us members of the bar declare, "Somebody should represent that poor soul," but none of us is willing, that we are the liars we are made out to be.

None of this is intrinsically liberal or conservative. There are leftist lawyers who take on the cause of reactionaries who wish to march for white supremacy. There are "establishment" figures who file petitions for death row inmates. They have in common that they will give up a bit of love from people around them out of dedication to an abstract Constitutional creed.

Long afterward, if he is lucky then we congratulate the lawyer for the despised. In the based-on-reality thriller "Bridge of Spies," about a Cold War era secret agent for the Soviet Union who was caught plying his trade in New York City, it took the fame and goodwill accorded to director Steven Spielberg and star Tom Hanks to present a sympathetic story of his lawyer's zeal.

Even so, the dramatization compressed the timeline, understating the public hostility to the Hanks character, James Donovan, while accelerating his eventual vindication. Few of us have empathy for those who are reviled; for those who are wronged, yes, but only a rare soul pities those who are shunned enough to help them.

You can be a lawyer without ever doing as Adams did or Donovan too. But you won't be a lawyer who changes history as they did. Thanks to an award-winning biography, turned into a television miniseries, Adams has finally been given his due; Donovan was portrayed by “Everyman” Hanks. A society such as ours, "the city upon a hill" that is looked to the world over, always comes around to what is best.

This essay originally appeared at The Huffington Post.