Indeed, no business wants to carry unnecessary liability.

Funny, Didn't see all this crying about censorship when MC & Visa cut off pornhub...

edit: just to be clear, I mean when MC & Visa decided pornhub was a potential liability, they cut them off. When companies decide Trump or Parler are a liability - they do the same - they cut them off. Thats just capitalism.

In my circles, there was huge backlash against the Pornhub decision by Visa and MC. It was a terrible action.

I don't recall seeing much about it? Though, I have to admit I don't do social media much.

Certain topics are stigmatized for various reasons so lots of people don't want to be seen to complain about things because they would then be associated with the topic and get the stigma too.

I don't agree that it's 'just capitalism'. Just because I acquire a piece of private property does not necessarily give me the right to do anything I want with it.

I can't clobber you over the head with a product I bought just like how many countries have laws to say I can't kick you out of private property that's also a public square.

>>I don't agree that it's 'just capitalism'. Just because I acquire a piece of private property does not necessarily give me the right to do anything I want with it.

However, you can evict me from the property and charge me with trespassing, which is closer to whats happening here.. edit: Hell, you can even infringe my 2nd amendment rights and ban me from having a gun on your property!

Also, I'm not sure 'private' property can be a 'public' square. At least in New England, the town commons was public land ?

There are instances where such freedoms are granted to individuals while on private property. However, it is limited to specific circumstances and only when a specific jurisdiction's laws require it.

Quickly looking this up brings me to the supreme court ruling, Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins [1], which involved laws that were specific to the state of California.

Notably, the applicability of this ruling was narrowed over time. Despite this, it has been brought up as an argument in situations with circumstances that differed from those of the original ruling, where questions of its applicability can be easily raised.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

Hmm - must have been pretty hard to narrow, since its seems to specifically target shopping centers ?

edit: I seem to remember my son's class not being able to petition in front of a grocery store in California like 20 years ago...Wonder if it had been narrowed by then?

In New England they also practiced banishment and put people in stocks for moral infractions.

Most of the world including New England still locks people up for moral infractions, even if no longer using stocks.

Access to legal counsel is in a special category. Law firms are expected to represent people accused of the very worst crimes in order to promote a just outcome. It's extremely disturbing that political actions which may be distasteful but could never be prosecuted as crimes in normal circumstances have become a justification to harass law firms until they refuse to represent a client. I say "normal circumstances" because I'm not sure how long it will be until we get show trials and mass convictions of political figures.

> Law firms are expected to represent people accused of the very worst crimes in order to promote a just outcome.

We're entitled to an attorney when defending ourselves from criminal prosecution, but where does it say we're entitled to legal counsel at any other time?

At the end of the day Law Firms are businesses, and again these are just businesses protecting their own self interests.

If they end up needing legal counsel for a criminal trial they'll receive it. Otherwise they can just grab a phonebook and start calling ambulance chasers until they find one who will meet their other legal needs.

Legal rights are distinct from ideals and principles. "Freedom of speech", for example, is primarily an ideal. It has some encoding in law because it is such a valuable ideal, but no one should conflate the two and think that the ideal of "freedom of speech" doesn't apply unless the law says so. The law is not an ideal.

Access to legal representation is similarly an ideal that can't be reduced to its partial encoding in a very flawed legal system.

Do you believe that the idea of legal representation as a basic human right applies in the absence of pending litigation?

Does corporate personhood extend to the idea of legal representation?

Does the right to legal representation mandate that any legal firm be compelled to provide counsel to any client who demands it?

If someone assaults me or otherwise violates my rights, but I can't file suit to defend my rights, then in practice I essentially don't actually have those rights. This is elementary.

Read the PRC's constitution some time and see all the rights that it guarantees, yet no one actually enjoys those rights. They exist on paper only.

You continually ask questions that attack positions which no one has suggested. I've had to ignore about 80% of your comments because they are just diversions. No one said a word about "corporate personhood", for example, and no one is even talking about legal representation of corporations. It's not possible to have a meaningful discussion like this.

You responded to a comment about Parler's legal counsel dropping them and equated it to Civil Death.

Parler is a business, not a person.

Sorry. I wasn't aware of anything involving Parler's lawyers. The mass harassment of lawyers (leading to withdrawal) that I'm aware of involved Trump's lawyers. Perhaps they were retained by a corporation (idk), but I would find the question of corporate personhood irrelevant because Trump could just have retained them personally if he needed to.

To be clear, I don't think that the Trump lawsuits had any merit or should have been brought in the first place. But they should absolutely have been allowed to go through the normal legal process so they could be convincingly rebutted. Sending hundreds of threats to law firms should not be a political tactic in a democracy. That does nothing but give ammunition and validity to conspiracy theorists.

> Sorry. I wasn't aware of anything involving Parler's lawyers.

Your first comment was responding to someone talking about AWS, Apple, and Google dropping Parler. The discussion was around the right of lawyers to drop clients, clients being so toxic that no one is willing to represent them, legal counsel as a right, and the ramifications of a client being unable to secure counsel.

No one was talking about mass harassment but you.

> I've had to ignore about 80% of your comments because they are just diversions.

You're trying to argue something completely out of context. That 80% of comments you're ignoring are about the topic at hand.

There is some advocacy to provide public defenders in civil matters. The reasoning is that financial damages can effectively deny liberty, even though the method differs from criminal.

That of course would not mean pressing private firms into public service.

> That of course would not mean pressing private firms into public service.

Even so that wouldn't apply here. Parler lost their private counsel, not their legal counsel.

Do you have reason to believe that it’s harassment that is stopping these people from getting legal counsel? Many of these people, Trump especially, have shown that they refuse to listen to legal council and will lie for no good reason at all, then throw their legal council under the bus if it seems like it will advantage them. There are many good reasons lawyers might not want to touch the current situation with a ten foot pole besides harrasement.

I'll give a few quick links, but a quick search turns up dozens and I think you're competent enough to search for yourself. You have public statements of "Yes, going after Trump’s law firms is fair game" and then you have the expected harassment and law firms pulling out en masse. Maybe the client's toxicity is a factor, but that should be the only factor.

[0] https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/11/1... [1] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/13/law-firm-drops-trum... [2] https://thenewamerican.com/new-low-democrats-approve-harassm...

If we start compelling lawyers to provide legal counsel to clients, what protections do we afford those lawyers? In several cases over the last election, Judges threatened lawyers with sanctions and loss of right to practice for bringing forth clearly baseless lawsuits and wasting the court's time.

If we affirm that the right to legal counsel is a human right and that corporations also receive that right, how do we protect lawyers from clients which ignore legal counsel and file frivolous that can threaten the lawyer's right to practice law?