The news of Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson’s involvement in the legal representation of two Libyans charged in the Pan Am 103 bombing, which killed 270 people, is not about a lawyer’s ethical choice to defend an unpopular client. That issue has been around for centuries, from John Adams’ defense of British soldiers charged with killing American colonists during the Boston Massacre, to Clarence Darrow’s defense of “thrill-killers” Leopold and Loeb, to Cravath, Swaine & Moore’s defense of Credit Suisse bank’s alleged laundering of plundered Nazi gold. Thompson justifies his brief personal involvement � his law firm, Arent Fox Kintner Plotkin & Kahn, billed close to $1 million for its work on the Libyan case � on the truism that every client deserves competent and professional representation. And of course he’s right. It’s a principle of democracy that even the American Bar Association sort of endorses in its Model Rule 1.2(b), which states that “[a] lawyer’s representation of a client . . . does not constitute an endorsement of the client’s political, economic, social or moral views or activities.”
The problem is not that Thompson behaved unethically in lending his expertise in the defense of morally repugnant people. Nor is the issue whether an attorney has an ethical obligation to represent any particular client, or may pick and choose which clients to represent. Attorneys plainly have the discretion to make those choices. And Thompson made just such a choice. Moreover, as a presidential candidate on the campaign trail, Thompson justified his representation by arguing that he and his partners, all upstanding members of the bar, were somehow keeping faith with great constitutional principles that all defendants, no matter how despicable, have the right to legal representation. He even suggested that if he and his firm did not step up to the plate, no one would have � meaning, these alleged terrorists would have been denied their constitutionally guaranteed right to counsel. The real question is whether Thompson and his partners had any affirmative obligation to represent the terrorists, and whether the public has a right to consider that choice of representation � and subsequent justification � in evaluating Thompson’s character, judgment and fitness to be president.
