Canceling Lawyers - Case Studies of Accountability, Toleration, and Regret

Lawyers who are criticized for representing unpopular clients - in today's political climate these may include firearms manufacturers, fossil fuel companies, and powerful men accused of sexual misconduct - explain that the long tradition of representing everyone is an essential ingredient in the defense of the rule of law. They may see contemporary episodes of criticism as the threat of mob rule. Like much of the controversy nowadays over "cancel culture," the two sides seem to be talking past each other. This book explains that both sides are onto something. The rule of law is a valuable political ideal but lawyers are people too, and others care about the attitudes and motivations that underlie the representation of controversial clients.

List of contents

• Preface


• 1. Swiss Banks and Nazi Gold


• Crisis at Cravath


• Against nonaccountability


• The justification of John Adams


• The Freedman-Tigar debate


• "Ethics rules" and client choice . for American lawyers


• Contested meanings


• 2. Morality and Relationships: Accountability and Reactive Attitudes


• Morality beyond duties and rights


• Reactive attitudes


• Reactive attitudes and reasonable expectations


• Reactive attitudes and the scope of the moral community


• 3. Harvey Weinstein, Ronald Sullivan, and Harvard University


• Joining Weinstein's dream team


• Answering "the Question"


• Making clients radioactive


• 4. Blame, the Meaning of Actions, and the Ethics of Blame


• Blameworthiness vs. wrongness


• What do you mean by that?


• The ethics of blaming


• How wide is the circle of blame?


• What standards apply to determine blameworthiness and appropriate blaming responses?


• Toleration


• Don't feed the trolls


• 5. Boycotts of Law Firms and the Ethics of Informal Social Sanctions


• The "obsequious servants of business"?


• Down with Big Oil


• Reasonable disagreement and the role of the legal system


• Formal and informal power


• 6. The Challenge of Role Morality


• The persistence of the personal


• Three mistakes about professional roles


• Mistake #1: Too much weight on the duties of the role


• Mistake #2: Too little appreciation for the significance of the role


• Mistake #3: Excluding personal identity altogether


• Roles and professional ethics


• Are roles exclusionary or just very weighty?


• 7. McCarthyism or Legitimate Criticism? Canceling Government Lawyers


• From the Trump administration back to polite society?


• Blame and the Big Lie


• Whose side are you on? The "Department of Jihad"


• Fidelity to law and abusive legal advice


• 8. Regret and Moral Costs


• Excruciating cases


• How moral remainders arise (and what to do with them)


• Conclusions

About the author

W. Bradley Wendel is a legal ethics scholar, trained as both a lawyer and a philosopher. He has a B.A. from Rice University, a J.D. from Duke Law School, and an LL.M. and J.S.D. from Columbia Law School, in legal philosophy. Before entering academia Dr. Wendel clerked for Judge Andrew J. Kleinfeld on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Fairbanks, Alaska, and practiced as a products liability litigator in Seattle. He started his academic career at Washington and Lee Law School and moved to Cornell Law School in 2014.

Summary

Lawyers take pride in a professional tradition of representing unpopular clients, understanding it as a contribution to the rule of law and the practice of toleration in a polarized society. This does not mean that lawyers are fully insulated from criticism for the clients they represent. The seemingly intractable debate over accountability for representing nasty clients is in part the result of a deep, structural tension between the institutions and procedures of the legal system, and the underlying issues and controversies about which people disagree. We also care about the attitudes and motives of lawyers, which play an important role in evaluating the actions of others. Much of the frustration experienced by lawyers who are criticized for representing unpopular clients arises from what lawyers see as the public's inability to understand the rule of law and the function of the legal system in resolving conflicts over rights and justice. Using a series of case studies, this book explores the possibility that both lawyers and their critics are right. There is genuine value in a system of formal law that aims at settling social disagreement, but that is not the whole story. Public criticism of lawyers may reflect the sense that the legal system has fallen short of ideals of fairness and inclusiveness. Many of the lawyer shaming or “canceling” episodes discussed in this book arise out of the representation of clients in matters involving issues where it appears that the official process of establishing and interpreting formal law has been captured by powerful interests. Accepting a certain amount of public criticism is necessary to avoid a dangerous isolation of the legal profession from accountability to the broader political community, or from the humanity of lawyers being submerged by their professional role.

Additional text

Canceling Lawyers explores the ethics of blame and its complex relationship to the rule of law. The independence of the judiciary is a fundamental component of the rule of law and, in democratic states, politicians tend to avoid personal attacks on judges when decisions do not go their way.

Product details

• Authors: WENDEL, W Bradley Wendel, W. Bradley Wendel, W. Bradley ( Wendel, Wendel W. Bradley
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 05.03.2024
• EAN: 9780197673423
• ISBN: 978-0-19-767342-3
• No. of pages: 304
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Law > International law, foreign law; Law, LAW / Ethics & Professional Responsibility, LAW / Legal Profession, Law & society, Legal skills & practice, Legal skills and practice, Law and society, sociology of law, Legal systems: regulation of legal profession, Regulation of legal profession