The Wrong Kind of Pity

 I was trying to explain to my parents the other day exactly what it is I find so distasteful about legal practice. They were quizzing me on a number of potential legal careers that I might once have entertained—trying to uncover why I had soured on them. The best I could do was to tell them that every form of legal practice I had yet encountered—including the reputedly more "idealistic" ones, such as civil rights law or environmental law—still involve winners and losers. You are therefore almost always making someone else's life on the other side significantly worse. 

Even if the person you are suing is the scum of the Earth, therefore—even if they are Rudy Giuliani, say—you nonetheless have to be the sort of person who is comfortable with ruining someone's life. You have to believe that Rudy Giuliani is so utterly without redeeming value that you do not mind financially destroying a human being. And you not only need to believe that about Rudy Giuliani—you also have to believe it about a large enough group of adversaries that you can find enough of them to sue to last you for the course of an entire legal career. 

Some people have that in them. They believe enough in their own and their client's cause—or they believe abstractly enough in environmentalism, say—that they are comfortable assuming that the defendant on the other side must always be in the wrong. Thus, they do not mind potentially devastating the opposition. They feel righteous enough in their side of the issue that the prospect does not weigh on their conscience. But I can never be that person. I am useless for that kind of work. I am too haunted by the words of the poet Robert Lowell: "Perhaps, one always took the wrong side..."

I am thus and will forever be someone who sees more sides of every issue than is good for me. I'll never forget the first time I read Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, and found in the speech of one of its principal characters the essence of my own plight: "I was born condemned to be one of those who has to see all sides of a question. When you're damned like that, the questions multiply for you until in the end it's all question and no answer." This is what leads, in the play's terms, to the "wrong kind of pity"—the kind that makes you feel for your client's opponent. 

That kind of pity is surely useless in a lawyer. It makes you incapable of the sort of zealous one-sided advocacy the profession demands. It forces you to kick off the moral blinders that are required to gun straight for the financial annihilation of your adversary on the other side. No, lawyers ought not to feel "the wrong kind of pity" for the polluters or the Rudy Giulianis of the world. I don't dispute it. But there have to be people enough in this world already who are incapable of feeling that kind of pity. Let them be the lawyers. I don't need to join them myself.