Should We Expose Lawyers Who Contribute to Climate Change?
Whether or not Twitter is dying, it is still home to the occasional healthy debate between minds. Legal Twitter is not immune to this as we can see in the responses to a recent post by Jolyon Maugham, Director of the Good Law Project.
In the tweet he links to a Reuters article where he was interviewed about a recent decision by a number of lawyers to refuse to work for fossil-fuel clients. Maugham also included a relevant quote:
“We want them to face public criticism for doing so. Lawyers understand causation, they will understand that the bringing of new fossil-fuel projects into the world is going to be profoundly destructive on an absolutely epic, existential scale.”
This so-called ‘Declaration of Conscience’ is something that I discussed at the time in this newsletter and it is good to see that it remains in the news even as something that prompts debate about a previously accepted norm.
This latest rhetoric from Maugham, however, appears to go further by saying that not only should lawyers who have signed the declaration be spared from the ‘cab rank rule’ when it comes to polluting clients but lawyers who actively facilitate new projects that will cause further climate change should face public criticism in the same way that large, corporate banks do.
Naturally this prompted some serious feedback, not least from another heavyweight in the legal Twittersphere; The Secret Barrister. The best-selling author replied as follows:
“I’m sorry, Jo. You want junior criminal barristers to “face public criticism” for independently prosecuting criminal cases? You want them to face *public criticism* for discharging their professional obligation to uphold the rule of law?
“Would you like to reconsider that?”
There is then some back-and-forth that I won’t go into for the sake of brevity but, for what it’s worth, I think the debate here comes down to a bit of a misunderstanding.