Law Commons^™

Defending Defending: The Case For Unmitigated Zeal On Behalf Of People Who Do Terrible Things, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Although defending defending may be an endless pursuit, I cannot help taking it on. I am, after all, a defender myself, and defending fellow defenders seems to go with the territory. Of course, attacks on criminal defenders do not come out of nowhere - difficult and complex questions often arise in criminal defense work. Unfortunately, the questions that are raised in the aftermath of a high profile case such as the Abner Louima case are usually the easy ones - questions that have more to do with the nature of the adversarial system than with the values or ethics of …