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To be fair, the way legal system works means if a lawyer isn’t trying to ‘win’ your case, they’re not being a good lawyer - the assumption your client is innoce
by kitchen_sink 3y ago
To be fair, the way legal system works means if a lawyer isn’t trying to ‘win’ your case, they’re not being a good lawyer - the assumption your client is innocent and you need to defend them is kinda fundamental.
How morality informs the law and the ways lawyers should behave (i.e, should they phone it in/decline the case in if they disagree ethically) is interesting but more difficult as a topic
- bumby 3y agoI think this is mostly correct. Not only are lawyers who aren't trying to "win" not good lawyers, they are possibly breaching their oath. The lawyer has an obligation to try and win, but only after they have done a preliminary investigation before filing the case. There are also some guardrails; your lawyer can't lie about facts they've found out during that investigation, for example. If they do, they can be sanctioned for it. So they can't just try and win at all costs. With all that said, I think the original point still stands: in most people's minds, an 'ideal' system is one where all the lawyers are trying to seek justice. We just create a less-than-ideal adversarial system as a weak proxy for that given that human nature tends to make the ideal an unreliable expectation. I don't think that's fundamentally different from the PD transparency issue.