The Duty of Law Firms Under Attack

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Credit…Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “How a Law Firm Decided to Fold Instead of Fight,” (front page, March 23):

As the former pro bono coordinator at a major New York law firm I am old enough to have lived through McCarthyism, so I read with dismay your article on the complicity of the Paul, Weiss law firm with President Donald Trump. Regardless of any short-term financial gains, the firm is on the wrong side of history.

We remember Pete Seeger refusing to name names while offering to sing a song, Arthur Miller writing “The Crucible” about witch hunts, and Edward R. Murrow bravely exposing Senator Joseph McCarthy on the nascent medium of television while those who testified are now relegated to perfidy or oblivion.

Another hero was Joseph Welch, a partner in a renowned Boston law firm, who helped topple Senator McCarthy with a memorable confrontation in Congress with his famous retort, “Have you no sense of decency?”

Powerful law firms across the country should similarly step up. Their collective adherence to principle would mean that clients had nowhere else to go, and would cause the administration to lose its power over law firms. The rule of law and democracy would then be strengthened.

Daniel L. Greenberg
New York
The writer is a former attorney-in-chief at the Legal Aid Society and a founder of Experience Justice.

To the Editor:

My grandfather, Louis S. Weiss, was a founding partner of Paul, Weiss. My father, Louis H. Pollak (who President Trump would have classified as a “radical left lunatic”), was a federal judge, civil rights advocate and constitutional law expert who worked briefly at that firm. Both of these lawyers would have been horrified by Brad Karp’s capitulation to the Trump administration. They might even have called the $40 million deal a payoff — and a spineless one at that.