I don't see how it conflicts with "everyone gets a chance to a proper defense" (at least as much as "everyone gets a chance to a proper defense" is true in the current system), so there might be some misunderstanding here.
I can't. That makes two of us.
> The US enshrined in the Constitution that every single person, no matter what they did, will have the right to a legal defense. If that is the case, how would morality play a role here? Are you suggesting that we should teach lawyers to only represent clients they think are good people?
If lawyers exercised their own independent views of morality and ethics that would imply the possibility that very odious people can be left without any legal representation. Which is contrary to the constitution.
If the relative amorality of upholding The Law is unpalatable for some, then maybe they aren't cut out to practice law. Perhaps being made of sterner stuff is a key prerequisite, not too different from practicing medicine, where the hippocratic oath obliges one to medically serve even the most repugnant criminals.
[1] https://news.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/metadiplomat-the-r...
There's a lot of room between "lawyers have no responsibility for remedying injustice in the current system" and "lawyers should just decide who's guilty and refuse to deal with them".
- Deciding what kind of case law they specialize in
- Deciding where to work
- Deciding how the work should be done
This whole article is about how Harvard is encouraging lawyers to ignore any professional responsibility in favour of monetary compensation.
These are 100%, or close to it, personal decisions.
The other decisions all involve, in some portion, personal views as to what's right and wrong.
IMO (and IANAL), I think that the ethics of the situation demand that lawyers represent the best interests of their clients in civil and criminal matters.
> The future will never have to ask with misgiving, what could the Nazis have said in their favor. History will show that whatever could be said, they were allowed to say. They have been given the kind of trial which they, in the days of their pomp and power, never gave to any man. But fairness is not weakness. The extraordinary fairness of these hearings is an attribute to our strength. . . . The United States has no interest which would be advanced by the conviction of any defendant if we have not proved him guilty on at least one of the counts charged against him in the Indictment. Any result that the calm and critical judgment of posterity would pronounce unjust, would not be a victory for any of the countries associated in this prosecution.
You want to compare ensuring a fair trial to the Nazis "just following orders"? Okay. What is your alternative, then, other than unfair trials? How is that justice?
Do you take issue with the latter?
You propose that lawyers "work" toward a certain goal. In any individual instance, that goal either is or is not in the client's best interest.
If it is in their client's best interest, then your proposal is a nullity; it changes nothing about the attorney's ethical obligations.
If it is not in their client's best interest, then to do that "work" would deny the client effective assistance of counsel. That would constitute structural injustice.
It's a simple question.
It's a nonsensical platitude, spoken by someone who neither knows, nor is interested in knowing, the subject matter.
If you want to be taken seriously, learn something about the systems you're trying to reform before telling other people how to do their jobs.
Otherwise, seems we've reached an impasse, so I'll just take my leave.
> [We only] ensure that the system operates according to the specification
Right. That's the substance of the complaint.
While your viewpoint is a reasonable interpretation of "the law", it completely ignores the higher-order responsibility for "justice" to serve as a moral compass and balance of power.
Your comparison to “following orders” is specious. Lawyers are bound by criminal laws the same as soldiers are bound by the laws of war. “Following orders” isn’t a defense in either case. But soldiers aren’t expected to independently apply their moral judgment. “War crimes” are defined by international consensus. And soldiers are bound to “follow orders” when they’re not being asked to commit war crimes.
In fact, attorneys typically hold themselves to extremely high standards of ethics - just not the ethics people think of. I'm sure they exist, but out of all the many lawyers I've met, I have never met one who did not take things like attorney-client privilege, being an officer of the court, or duties surrounding disclosure and discovery and conflicts of interest extremely seriously. It's very much a case of "orange and blue morality"[0]: It's not that the rules they follow aren't taken seriously, it's that those rules are not the rules most people imagine.
So, the idea that attorneys should abandon the principles of the system they've dedicated their life to because some layperson's sense of ethics demands it is foolish, in that even if it might produce a "better" result to your sensibilities or mine, it's simply not going to happen, not because attorneys are amoral, but precisely the opposite: Because they are moral according to the morality of their system.
Look: People don't like the justice system because it doesn't always produce results that they agree with. They don't like or understand its convoluted, highly layered, self-referential sets of ever-shifting, multi-faceted rules and tests and interpretations and arguments about the technicalities of meanings of words. And that's fine. But a system of justice based on even the most altruistic "X seems right to me" is going to be an order of magnitude worse for at least some people, and I have yet to hear an idea for replacing our current system that doesn't boil down to either that or our current system, but it somehow magically always makes the decisions people personally want.
[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMor...
It’s not our job to leverage our trusted position in the system to advance our personal view of morality or ethics. Society doesn’t need us to be its conscience. Indeed, that destroys the very system we are supposed to serve.