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As a lawyer, can you be forced to take a case that violates your personal or ethical beliefs?

What happens if you continuously refuse such cases?

Anonymous User wrote:As a lawyer, can you be forced to take a case that violates your personal or ethical beliefs?

What happens if you continuously refuse such cases?

Become a libertarian relevatist -- problem solved.

If you work for yourself, you can take or not take any case you damn well please. If you work for a firm, you will take any case the partner damn well pleases. I believe there was some sort of accommodation by a big firm handling tobacco defense work for any associate who felt uncomfortable working on the matter, but I have no idea how common that sort of thing is. And my guess is, if you're a public defender, you don't really have much option to decline cases at all (at least while you're low in seniority).

Anonymous User wrote:As a lawyer, can you be forced to take a case that violates your personal or ethical beliefs?

What happens if you continuously refuse such cases?

You don't HAVE to take any case as an attorney. Some states even have provisions in their code of ethics or oaths that require you to evaluate whether a case is one that is just (those are holdovers from the field code and other bygone ethical rules for attorneys that no one pays much attention to).

At a firm though, you aren't allowed to morals or personal beliefs. You do what you are told.

Anonymous User wrote:As a lawyer, can you be forced to take a case that violates your personal or ethical beliefs?

What happens if you continuously refuse such cases?

Check your state's ethics code/ABA model ethics rules. As for your second question - probably nothing good for you.

HTH, 0L-anon ( ).

Anonymous User wrote:As a lawyer, can you be forced to take a case that violates your personal or ethical beliefs?

What happens if you continuously refuse such cases?

If you're working for someone they can fire you no matter how many cases you do or don't take.

vtoodler wrote:As a lawyer, can you be forced to take a case that violates your personal or ethical beliefs?

What happens if you continuously refuse such cases?

You get outed because your vague hypothetical 0L question didn't need to be anonymous, for starters.

Oh, and your thread gets locked after you PM the mod to complain that you did nothing wrong and were "embarrassed and publicly humiliated" by being outed.