Posted on 07/24/2005 2:21:05 PM PDT by SmithL
When a great lawyer like John Roberts argues a case, does he do so out of the passion of his own conscience? Or is he merely a hired gun -- a legal soldier of fortune willing to muzzle his own convictions?
That may be the key to deciphering the latest Supreme Court nominee, a jurist who has been on the bench for only a couple of years and thus has a slim paper trail of decisions. Within hours of the president naming John Roberts, activists seized upon briefs he signed as former President George Bush's deputy solicitor general -- particularly one contending that Roe vs. Wade "was wrongly decided and should be overturned" -- to draw conclusions about his thinking.
Most legal scholars consider that preposterous. They remind us that lawyers see the world differently from other people. To them, Roberts' briefs don't necessarily reflect Roberts' views. Instead they reflect the interests of his client at the time, who happened to be the president of the United States.
It's even rather misleading to say Roberts wrote the brief, considering that his name appears sixth down in a list of lawyer signatories. Laurence Tribe, the liberal Harvard law professor who argued the case for the other side, said it would be a bum rap to hold the brief against Roberts.
"You can't tell anything from those briefs," said Shannen Coffin, partner in the Washington firm Steptoe and Johnson and former deputy assistant attorney general. "I just spent three years with the government and defended any range of federal law and actions, some of which I agreed with and some not at all. There's always the satisfaction of a job well done...
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
If I was paying the lawyer, he/she had better be representing my interests and nothing else!
Robert Bennett, Clinton's $300-an-hour lawyer, responded recently with one of the more memorable quotes in the history of high-level litigation. "In terms of size, shape, direction, whatever the devious mind wants to concoct, the president is a normal man," he said. "There are no blemishes, there are no moles, there are no growths."
yeah, what the heck kind of question is that from this writer.
Of course, what he's really saying is that lawyers are whores, but we already knew that.
Oh-oh, Tribe is defending Roberts. Could be another Souter here, boys and girls! Never forget: Bush is a liberal! That's why he won't defend our borders. That's why he criticizes the Minutemen while palling around with Vicente Fox. That's why he's going along with plans to form a single North American country embracing Canada, USA, and Mexico.
I guess prostitute is the correct term. Whores do it for free.
Sluts do it for free. Whores gotta get paid..
It's already getting to be too confusing. How many average joe Americans understand this concept? Somebody on our side needs to get out front quick and explain it before he's permanently branded.
In his confirmation testimony two years ago, Roberts said that judges should be "ever mindful that they are insulated from democratic pressures precisely because the Framers expected them to be discerning law, not shaping policy," and added: "That means that judges should not look to their own personal views or preferences in deciding the cases before them. Their commission is no license to impose their preferences from the bench."
The problem of course is that every judge claims not to be imposing their own personal views or preferences, but rather merely to be interpreting the law.
I've known a lot of people in government service who take their oaths serious. I don't have any reason to doubt that even some judges do as well.
ping
bears repeating. It's called a "lawbotomy" and they perform this on every law school grad. It is not good for a human being to take one side of an issue, argue it passionately, then take the opposition and argue it with equal passion. Don't care what a lawyer is "supposed" to be...it's not a good thing for a person's soul.
>>It is not good for a human being to take one side of an issue, argue it passionately, then take the opposition and argue it with equal passion. <<
Why not? I am as passionate in my support for conservative issues as anyone, yet can argue the liberal side better than liberals can (I don't have to resort to name calling).
That doesn't make me any less of a conservative.
"It's called a "lawbotomy" and they perform this on every law school grad. It is not good for a human being to take one side of an issue, argue it passionately, then take the opposition and argue it with equal passion. Don't care what a lawyer is "supposed" to be...it's not a good thing for a person's soul."
That's rediculous. An attorney is an advocate for his client. In moot court in law school, I had to advocate a side and as practice, I would argue the oppposite to my partner. You argue the position, not the emotion.
Dean
If you believe one thing, you believe it. You cannot also believe its opposite and be strictly sane. And keeping belief completely divorced from argument is like keeping marriage divorced from fidelity.
I know what moot court is. I just think it's bad for young people.
I asked a young lawyer for whom I worked once how he could represent a particular client and he replied "Because I believe that everyone is entitled to a defence." He also told me that was why he didn't normally do employment or criminal law; he didn't feel comfortable defending someone whose defence didn't go along with his personal beliefs. But he didn't let that interfere with his work after he had taken the job. A lawyer who didn't take his client's point of view is not properly defending his client.
Of course you can argue both sides of an axiom. Didn't you ever take Argumentation and Debate at school? There you are TOLD which side to argue and you do it. The idea is to be able to construct a coherent argument from the facts that are presented to you. It's good for you to have to take the other point of view now and then.
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