Most readers have probably heard the lawyer joke that goes like this:  Why have scientists started using lawyers in laboratory experiments?  Because there are some things that rats just won’t do.

Some lawyers get all steamed up over jokes like this.  I never take offence at lawyer jokes, no matter how caustic.  I just figure they don’t apply to me, and I try to conduct myself so that anyone who deals with me will realize it too. 

The lab rat joke is a good example.  At the risk of provoking letters castigating me for filling this page with a nauseating holier-than-thou sermon, the fact is that there are lots of things I just won’t do.  Over the years, I’ve turned away a number of clients who wanted me to do things for them that I found morally repugnant.  The problem is, a great many of those things were perfectly legal.  Some are becoming downright commonplace.

For instance, I’ve turned away people who had lived common-law with someone and thought they should be entitled to walk away with a share of their ex-lover’s house merely because they had helped clean it for a couple of years.  

I’ve turned away people who had signed separation agreements with full legal advice a few years earlier and now wanted to get them overturned because they weren’t happy with the course their lives had taken and wanted to make their former partners share in their misery.  

I’ve turned away people who wanted to set up corporations with relatives as nominal shareholders  so they could disguise a short-term bit of contract work as full-time employment and make themselves eligible for a year’s employment insurance benefits.  

Whenever I send people packing like this, I’m always careful to point out the distinction between what I think they might be able to achieve legally, and what I am willing to do for them as a matter of my own conscience.  It’s not that they don’t have a strong case according to current law, I’m obliged to tell them.  There’s a good chance that they will be able to find some other lawyer who will be able to ride it to victory.  But I can’t help asking myself: if I take this case and win it for this client, will I be able to stomach living in the kind of world I’ve helped to create?  

I rarely find out what these rejected would-be clients decide to do after leaving my office.  Maybe my moral condemnation shames some of them out of their plans—I don’t know.   However, I suspect that most of them simply go to another lawyer who doesn’t share my scruples and who  happily tries to assist them in transforming the world into the kind of place I don’t want to live in.  

What goes on in those other lawyers’ minds, I sometimes wonder?  Is it just that they disagree with my notions of what is right and wrong?  Unfortunately, I think it’s something far worse than that.  Occasionally when I’ve discussed these issues with other lawyers over the years, I’ve heard them say something like this:  "Well, maybe the law is unjust, but if I don’t take this case, somebody else will, so I might as well make a buck out of it as the next guy."

And that’s why we have the lab rat joke.  Maybe the reason some lawyers are so sensitive about it is that they know deep down that there’s a large grain of truth to it.

Personally, I find it’s getting harder and harder to find an area of law where I can do a good, conscientious job for clients without compromising my own principles. Matrimonial law has been my main field for 16 years, but it’s getting to be a whiner’s paradise, where no matter what outlandish claims someone makes, there’s some obliging judge or legislature willing to hand over someone else’s money.  The old swinging pendulum seems to have gotten permanently stuck way out in left field.  The choices for lawyers seem to be to act for plaintiffs pursuing claims that make you sick, or to act for defendants and always be on the losing side.

The same pattern seems to have developed in just about every field of law.  Who wants to be on the cutting edge of employment law, demanding that employers eradicate every word or gesture in the workplace that could conceivably be construed as sexual harassment, while simultaneously insisting that they be forbidden from dismissing employees without gobs of notice and severance pay?  Who wants to push the envelope in tort law, continually expanding the circle of bystanders who can be held responsible when someone gets drunk and smashes himself up in an accident?  Who wants to make headlines in the product liability field, extracting millions of dollars from a drive-through restaurant for a customer who spilled hot coffee in her lap?  Not me.  

Some lawyers seem to revel in this sort of thing.  I guess it makes them feel smarter than everybody else, making new law.  Well, they’re welcome to it.  I aspire to something more rewarding than being the smartest lab rat on the block.