Ah yes, “Dear Prudence, won’ty you come out to play?”
The Fab Four sang about her, but we digress.
There is nothing imprudent about representing people with whom you disagree. As I noted, an attorney always has the choice to not take a client; and any attorney who finds themself in a circumvolution created by failing to understand the difference between the client’s individual moral code and their distinctly spearate legal issues will soon find themself doing something other than practicing law.
I had a whole lot of clients with whom I might disagree, concerning their moral code. 6 years of defending people in criminal court will do that to you. It was not my job to judge their moral rightness or wrongness; it was my job to defend them in trial. Vigorously.
Pick and choose, select only the clients with whom you agree as to any underlying moral issues, and you will very shortly find yourself wishing, perhaps, you had become a doctor. Or a basket weaver.
And while we are at it, many doctors find themselves working to save the life of - oh, say a gan banger in Chicago, or Los Angelos, or Baltimore - gang bangers who may have committed multiple shootings, some resulting in murder.
Would you suggest that doctor walk into the emergency room, look at the kid bleeding and doing their best to die, and go “Oh, this one has been here several times and I know what they have done. I think I will just let them die…”?
An attorney has just as much duty to represent clients, whether it is in a divorce case, or a felony case, or an immigration case, or the CEO of some large corporation which obtains its products from a third world country (and those production workers have no health care, no insurance, no 401K, and make less per day than a high scholl kid might for a 45 minute job of cutting one’s lawn.
Suggestion: I understand you do not get what attorneys should do: you may not want to spend the $150,000 or more for that three year Juris Doctor. No, the cost does not justify what attorneys do. But attorneys have an ethical duty to represent clients, including those they most defintiely do not agree with in terms of personal morality.
And doing so is most definitely not immoral.
