5 Lawyers You Should Love For 'Love Your Lawyer Day'
As we all bask in the wonderment of this occasion, ATL presents the top attorneys that you should remember to honor on this day for their admirable contributions and enduring legacy.
You know what? I take it all back. Just chalk up my wild, rambling screed against the National “Love Your Lawyer Day” to early morning shakes brought on by acute caffeine deficiency. This whole holiday shoehorned down our throats by an American Bar Association confident in having remedied every ill facing the profession marks the long overdue recognition of lawyers as the heroes that firefighters and astronauts only wish they could be.
As we all bask in the wonderment of this occasion, ATL presents the top attorneys that you should remember to honor on this day for their admirable contributions and enduring legacy.
These lawyers truly deserve the respect that “Love Your Lawyer Day” preaches.
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* Roy Cohn
This vicious hate-monger of an attorney graduated from Columbia Law School as a spry 20-year-old before kicking off a long and distinguished career as a caricature of repugnancy. He followed up his work executing the Rosenbergs by becoming — upon the personal recommendation of J. Edgar Hoover — the “man behind the man” of McCarthyism as Senator Joe McCarthy’s chief attack dog ruining lives based on conjecture and innuendo at a ferocious clip.
After Cohn and McCarthy vigorously advanced the theory (which would come to be known as the “Lavender Scare”) that homosexuals formed the centerpiece of Soviet espionage, the U.S. went ahead and banned homosexuals from government service.
Did we mention that Cohn was almost certainly gay and died of AIDS while publicly slurring gays to the bitter end? Speaking of the bitter end, that’s also when he finally — after multiple failed prosecutions on charges of perjury and witness tampering — lost his license.
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The Simpsons, who based the recurring evil lawyer character on Cohn, summed up the man’s legacy best with a faux Paul Harvey broadcast: “That little boy…that nobody liked…grew up to be… Roy Cohn. And now you know the rest of the story.”
* Richard Nixon
Like Cohn, Tricky Dick — the most recent President to argue before the Supreme Court — also spent some quality time trampling the Constitution during the Red Scare as the head of the House Un-American Activities Committee before upping his game and so thoroughly shredding the nation’s foundational document that his own political allies were prepared to impeach and convict.
Without a doubt, America’s 37th President was best summed up in the closing lines of this obituary:
You don’t even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.
He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.
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* Nathaniel Carr
This Arizona attorney graced our pages only yesterday but it’s hard to find a more lovable lawyer than a guy who says of his own client: “He looks like a killer, not a retard,” all while billing Maricopa County $370,000 a year for his work.
It reminds me of this blast from the past video where a starry-eyed wannabe lawyer gushes over lawyers exonerating the wrongfully convicted before the wiser voice notes that “science cleared that guy… a lawyer put his ass in prison.” He was probably talking about the prosecutor, but Carr proves a defense lawyer can do the job just as well.
* Michael Fine
Ohio lawyer Michael Fine made headlines when, after one client took it upon herself to tape her meetings with him, police pinched him for hypnotizing female clients into performing sex acts. Fine ultimately surrendered his legal license amid the allegations.
From the original report:
“(Fine) then began to use ‘code’ words that induced Doe 1 to enter a trance-like stage,” [Bar Association lawyer Chris] Cook wrote.
Fine then began to use sexually charged language with the woman, urging her to have orgasms and told her that he was her “teacher.”
He also allegedly told her “that they have a ‘special bond,’ and that their conversations are ‘private conversations between us, nobody else, just us, right,’ that she is ‘being made love to by the world’s greatest lover,’ that she will not ‘cancel her next meeting,’ and that all she will remember about their conversation is that ‘we talked about legal matters,’” Cook wrote.
* Atticus Finch
The character is a beloved champion of the oppressed who launched the legal careers of thousands of white liberals and sits so securely atop the pantheon of fictional lawyers that the ABA Journal doesn’t even let him compete in its “greatest fictional lawyers” contest.
He’s an inveterate racist.
Happy Love Your Lawyer Day!
