Aaron Sibarium has written something of a magnum opus on a subject that’s been of grave concern to me for quite a while, whether young lawyers have forsaken their duty to represent people deemed deplorable in their eyes. Whenever I raise this problem, someone will reply that kids will be kids, and just wait until they get out in the real world. But as Aaron notes in the subtitle:
The kids didn’t grow out of it.
Rather than quote at painful length from Aaron’s post, go read it. Is he right? Is it too late to change the pathology of lawyers practicing in the Panopticon? Okay, one quote because it captures so much about the problem.
The adversarial legal system—in which both sides of a dispute are represented vigorously by attorneys with a vested interest in winning—is at the heart of the American constitutional order. Since time immemorial, law schools have tried to prepare their students to take part in that system.
Not so much anymore. Now, the politicization and tribalism of campus life have crowded out old-fashioned expectations about justice and neutrality. The imperatives of race, gender and identity are more important to more and more law students than due process, the presumption of innocence, and all the norms and values at the foundation of what we think of as the rule of law.
No, not all law students or baby lawyers, but to many, probably most, identity has overtaken principle as the foremost value of law. What does this mean for lawyers, for the law? Are we doomed? And if not, how do we get out from under this elevation of “moral imperatives” over due process and presumption of innocence? Can the lawyers who already adhere to this religion be converted, or are they lost to the law?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
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