Quack Lawyers

As a lawyer, it pains me to mention such names as Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and John Eastman, the “lawyers” who propped up and promoted Donald Trump’s whacky stolen election theories. That one of them had been a famous mayor of New York and another was a well-regarded law teacher makes the pain more intense. How the mighty are fallen!

Any lawyer who has practiced for more than a couple of months knows about clients who want to use you as a front for their wackadoodle, crooked schemes. Their thinking is that if someone shows up with a lawyer in tow, they’re serious and they’re dangerous. This foolishness grows out of the notion that lawyers are gunslingers for hire, threatening legal violence on behalf of whoever is writing the cheque.

Gunslinger outlaw lawyers do exist, as Giuliani and his bandidos prove. But those willing to whore themselves out are still in the tiny minority, at least until Trump and his fascists remake society and turn the legal profession into the compliance and enforcement arm of the ruling class. In that world, the rich and the connected get protection, the rest of us live under fear of the whip.

Our profession is old and honourable, centred on the proposition that there is demonstrable truth and that anyone of any status has a right to speak and prove the truth. The tools of the profession are about discovering the most probable explanation of things, whether or not it serves the whims of the powerful. The role of the profession is to keep the machinery of society working with the least friction and turbulence, to ensure that you can live your life with reasonable predictability rather than fear the rule of tooth and claw. That’s the foundation of the oaths we take.

So far the legal profession in the western world has proved robust and up to its task. But when individuals of the status of Giuliani, Powell, and Eastman are prepared to forsake their sacred oath and become sellers of snake oil, they assail not only free society, they attack the foundations of our noble profession.

For shame.