One of the reasons I did not become a lawyer (though urged to often, and offered an apprenticeship path for that), was my concern about morals in general. To be successful (not necessarily filthy rich, just remaining employed in someone else’s firm) it was my experience working with lawyers that:
(1) corporate lawyers are urged to be deceitful and withhold information
(2) plaintiff’s lawyers (and sometimes their civil defending counterparts) are urged to be verbally abusive/bullies, etc. Often this class of lawyers is urged to fabricate or exaggerate aspects of injury in tort actions (such as personal injury)
(3) criminal defense attorneys often are virtually “forced” to lie outright, and certainly to deliberately avoid knowing whether the client is guilty
even when the client is trying to admit guilt to them.
Now, as to the latter, defense attorneys are not required to be priests. It’s not their job to be a confessor or a moral judge: I’m well aware of that. However, I could not square with Truth the situation of having clear knowledge of a criminal’s actions and offering an untruthful affirmative defense. I could square with Truth simply ensuring that such a client of mine would get a fair trial, would be thoroughly represented as to facts, procedures, and rights of due process, including all rules of evidence, etc. But I personally would never be able to sleep at night knowing I had offered a deliberately deceptive affirmative defense of a client I knew to be guilty of a crime (especially a serious crime) and who had disclosed that to me (or I had equally powerful evidence of). And if such a dishonest defense were to exonerate such a perpetrator despite factual guilt, that would be a sense of my own personal guilt I would never be able to shake. (IOW, no, I do not fully support our country’s current mode & assumptions of practicing criminal defense law, which i.m.o. was not originally how it was practiced in this country. This has evolved over time.)
So back to OP’s question. Had I decided to follow the alternate career path of law instead of education, I would have looked carefully at fields of law, terms and modes of employment, and specialties of law. Thus, there are very moral criminal defense attorneys who never take cases of anyone they’re not convinced did not do the crime. (And, if they discover culpability early on in the process of building to a trial, they withdraw from the case.) This is also a practical move, btw, as it can be difficult to defend a person with passion if one is not convinced of their innocence. Possible, but difficult. I would say it is easier to do a merely formal defense of a thoroughly guilty criminal if you work for the county as a Public Defender, because there is less pressure to put on a showy, manufactured affirmative defense, and you will not lose your job unless you are incompetent or unethical.
There are fields of law which are also much more neutral as to win/lose, and which thus reduce the lying factor: real estate law, some other commercial law (again I would eliminate high-profile corporate law because highly profitable, high-profile businesses have a lot at stake in remaining profitable and in doing so visbly, because of stockholder perception as well as PR consequences).
My probate lawyer I believe partly chose that field because she could remain ethical in it. She also has insisted on always being self-employed. She has never had any pressure to take certain kinds of cases or to perform to some “company standard” regardless of ethics.
There are individual civil attorneys and individual firms which only take certain kinds of cases, or refuse wholly certain classes of cases.
Some people choose family law, but be warned that this is usually one of the least lucrative forms of law unless one gets enough experience and enough of a name to advance to high-profile clients, and then at that stage one will get into shady ethics (verbal abuse, threats, lies). Lower levels of family law do not require lying but do include a lot of “social work” and “criminal law work” in that we’re often talking about domestic abuse, poverty, and crime. (Not the world’s most uplifting way to spend the day.)
There are areas of law which promote some social justice teachings (such as class action lawsuits, such as individual cases supporting constitutional rights of an individual against a corporation or the gov’t), and of course anyone doing a just job in the defense of Justice (whatever the field of law) is indeed promoting Truth as well.
What attracted me to law initially was that I have unending thirst for intellectual argument. By contrast,I have a limited stomach for emotional argument, and unfortunately the latter is also the “stuff” of American law because there is so much “drama” in lawsuits and in courtroom trials. I decided I didn’t want to spend most of my day getting heated with people; it wasn’t good for my psyche or soul. One can be dispassionate if one works in constitutional law or appellate law, but it’s difficult to get positions in these. You usually have to hail from a prestigious law school, etc. (I felt that the anger component in law was not good for my spirituality; it did not make me peaceful in my personal life; so there was a religious component to that aspect of my decision as well.)
So one decision many lawyers have made (I have noticed, recently) is never to litigate.
I know a very successful lawyer who works in a big city, and his firm takes mostly class-action lawsuits, and they’re selective about the ethics of that. That has worked for him.
Do your research!
(In sum, i.m.o., it is possible but difficult to be an honest, succesful lawyer in the 21st century in the U.S. Lots of research and picking-and-choosing.)
