Jones Day, an Ohio-based law firm whose Washington D.C. office is representing the Trump campaign in post-election litigation, is facing intense criticism and even a recruiting boycott.
For example, the Lincoln Project plans to run ads urging lawyers and clients to avoid Jones Day, and some students at elite law schools are organizing a boycott of the firm’s recruiters.
But many law professors and lawyers are balking at efforts to penalize the firm for its association with Trump’s vainglorious efforts to overturn the election results.
Expressing a universally-held viewpoint of the legal profession, U.C.-Berkeley law professor Orin Kerr said, “Going after lawyers for representing unpopular clients in unpopular legal claims has a really bad history, and tends to not go well. Our legal system needs lawyers to take on unpopular clients.”
For example, even serial killers are entitled to legal representation. If they can’t get a fair trial, they can’t be convicted of their crimes. The ACLU has represented Nazis, on the very reasonable grounds that everybody has the same constitutional rights.
Remember, also, that Trump’s lawyers aren’t Trump. Unlike him, they have ethical boundaries, and don’t necessarily have blood leaking out of their faces. As a lawyer with an obnoxious client once humbly told me, “God makes my clients, and I only represent ’em.” (Almost any lawyer will tell you that the hardest part of their job often is dealing with their own clients.)
So, let Trump have lawyers and legal representation. We’re all better off if Trump operates within the legal system; letting him fight his battles in the courts is definitely preferable to armed mobs of his supporters taking his fight into the streets.