Pro Bono for Patriots
My friends and family know that since coming to law school I have often struggled with the idea of becoming a lawyer. My basic perception on the matter has always been that to be a lawyer is to be part of the problem in America, not part of the solution. My way is to paint with a broad brush, be a visionary - and most of my solutions to America's problems involve human freedom and limited government. Most of the legal community is not on board with much of this approach. From the first week of law school we are taught that detail-oriented precision multiplied into unlimited drudgery is the benchmark of success in the profession. The invention of the law review responded to the basic need on the part of big law firms to find students desensitized to long hours of basically meaningless drudgery. To add to this narrowness, law professors are basically uniformly liberal (example: OSU Moritz has no conservative professors, a couple of libertarians, and 50-some liberals), and their discussions rarely allow the question of whether there is a non-government solution.
One of the most annoying things about the profession is the attitude that we take toward national security. The most frequent national security related pro bono work among top national law firms is to adopt a Gitmo detainee. For example, WilmerHale spent $17 million worth of pro bono hours getting the ridiculous SCOTUS victory in Boumediene. Now, I am a big fan of the adversarial system, the right of criminal defendants to counsel, etc. However, the fact that, given a wide range of pro bono alternatives against terrorism, the uniform urge among lawyers was to jump to protect suspected terrorists is troubling, especially since there has not seemed to be a countervailing urge to protect innocents against terrorists. There are many opportunities for creative lawyering that combats Islamic radicals and protects the innocent, but to date they are underutilized.
There are a number of reasons for this, but mostly I think it is a result of the liberal groupthink that lawyers join as soon as they go to law school - all dissenting voices are stifled, they basically never hear an intelligent conservative opinion, and they grow into the profession steeped in an outdated 1960s-era view of government. It is not post-9/11 politics that informs their views, it is Watergate, Vietnam, the Sexual Revolution, and all the other good stuff that law professors grew up steeped in. By drinking in what we are taught in law school, we generally date ourselves back to the youth of our professors. Republicans are bad because of Nixon and so we don't like George W. Bush and get hysterical about his policies and take whatever side is opposite of him, no matter how dubious.
All of this is to say, I was completely elated to discover that some lawyers are willing to break from what is popular and do some meaningful pro-bono work that is not antagonistic toward the Bush administration: helping Iraqi refugees move to the United States after helping U.S. forces there.
Mostly I recommend reading the article, although there was one point I wanted to note more thoroughly: the perverse result of requiring interviews with UNHCR officials for the process of helping refugees get away. This would not be a problem, except that many of the UNHCR interviewers are angry people from human-rights-abusing countries (like Syria!) that hate the United States and are willing to use their positions and punish refugees (rather than helping them like they're supposed to) just because those refugees have helped the U.S. One interviewer said that the refugees who have helped U.S. forces are "America's dogs" - and others are suspected of leaking the identity of refugees to Iraqi militias who then kill the refugees and their families.
I have great admiration for the lawyers who tirelessly work through this broken system to protect the lives of the Iraqi heroes that have saved lives of U.S. forces. From a public policy perspective, however, I think it demonstrates that unconditional multilateralism and U.N. involvement create more problems than they solve.
-BKW
One of the most annoying things about the profession is the attitude that we take toward national security. The most frequent national security related pro bono work among top national law firms is to adopt a Gitmo detainee. For example, WilmerHale spent $17 million worth of pro bono hours getting the ridiculous SCOTUS victory in Boumediene. Now, I am a big fan of the adversarial system, the right of criminal defendants to counsel, etc. However, the fact that, given a wide range of pro bono alternatives against terrorism, the uniform urge among lawyers was to jump to protect suspected terrorists is troubling, especially since there has not seemed to be a countervailing urge to protect innocents against terrorists. There are many opportunities for creative lawyering that combats Islamic radicals and protects the innocent, but to date they are underutilized.
There are a number of reasons for this, but mostly I think it is a result of the liberal groupthink that lawyers join as soon as they go to law school - all dissenting voices are stifled, they basically never hear an intelligent conservative opinion, and they grow into the profession steeped in an outdated 1960s-era view of government. It is not post-9/11 politics that informs their views, it is Watergate, Vietnam, the Sexual Revolution, and all the other good stuff that law professors grew up steeped in. By drinking in what we are taught in law school, we generally date ourselves back to the youth of our professors. Republicans are bad because of Nixon and so we don't like George W. Bush and get hysterical about his policies and take whatever side is opposite of him, no matter how dubious.
All of this is to say, I was completely elated to discover that some lawyers are willing to break from what is popular and do some meaningful pro-bono work that is not antagonistic toward the Bush administration: helping Iraqi refugees move to the United States after helping U.S. forces there.
Mostly I recommend reading the article, although there was one point I wanted to note more thoroughly: the perverse result of requiring interviews with UNHCR officials for the process of helping refugees get away. This would not be a problem, except that many of the UNHCR interviewers are angry people from human-rights-abusing countries (like Syria!) that hate the United States and are willing to use their positions and punish refugees (rather than helping them like they're supposed to) just because those refugees have helped the U.S. One interviewer said that the refugees who have helped U.S. forces are "America's dogs" - and others are suspected of leaking the identity of refugees to Iraqi militias who then kill the refugees and their families.
I have great admiration for the lawyers who tirelessly work through this broken system to protect the lives of the Iraqi heroes that have saved lives of U.S. forces. From a public policy perspective, however, I think it demonstrates that unconditional multilateralism and U.N. involvement create more problems than they solve.
-BKW
posted by Brian at 7:34 AM
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