Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

Abstract

This article is part of a symposium on W. Bradley Wendel’s Canceling Lawyers: Case Studies of Accountability, Toleration, and Regret. I agree with Wendel’s two fundamental claims: first, and contrary to the reigning conception, lawyers can be held accountable for choosing to represent a particular client (assuming they have a choice), and therefore that they cannot use their professional role as a “magic shield or force field” (Wendel’s term) to deflect all criticism. Second, however, there is also an ethics of blaming, and critics who blame lawyers irresponsibly can themselves be blamed. One of Wendel’s examples is lawyers who chose to represent convicted sexual predator Harvey Weinstein, and this paper examines some complications in his analysis of the example. It next examines Wendel’s analysis of who has standing to hold lawyers to account – only those in the affected community, or the public at large? Wendel is undecided, but leans toward the former. I argue for the latter, with two caveats: first, that the ethics of blame includes a heavy responsibility of due diligence on the part of the blamer, and second, that the due diligence requirement becomes more onerous the wider the audience of the blame. (It is minimal if a blamer keeps their criticism to themself or confines it to a small circle of friends; it is maximal if the blamer plasters it all over social media.) The paper next takes up Wendel’s example of law students calling on their classmates to boycott law firms whose clients contribute to climate change. In its final section, it discusses Wendel’s defense of Big Law lawyers who filed non-frivolous lawsuits in the Trump campaign’s 2020 efforts to overturn the presidential election. He distinguishes them from the “outlandish” efforts of Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and Rudolph Giuliani. I take a dimmer view of the Big Law efforts, arguing that all the lawsuits must be viewed holistically as an assault on democracy.

Publication Citation

Forthcoming in Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies, Symposium on W. Bradley Wendel's Canceling Lawyers, 2026.

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