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"Williams Suggests Improving Criminal
Bar"
Harvard Law
Record - October 27, 1966 - Page 7
By John Spitzer
reprinted by permission
Striking out at the "horrendous vacuum" of good trial lawyers in America, Edward Bennett Williams told a capacity crowd in Ames Courtroom October 14 that the "famine" of advocates is a serious threat to the Bill of Rights.
The defender of Joe McCarthy, Jimmy Hoffa, Frank Costello, Bobby Baker, Adam Clayton Powell and Confidential Magazine proposed a "three cushion shot" as a "dramatic and bold new try" to attract the best lawyers to defend human freedom and individual liberties:
1) Required courses in law schools to develop in students the principles, techniques and strategies of advocacy.
2) A period of "externship" during the third year in which the student would work with a district attorney or public defender.
3) A required two-year "internship" in which the young lawyer would work in the courtroom trying cases for the indigent. He challenged students to leave the "monastic cells of the Law Reviews" and work in a courtroom "to see and work with the machinery of justice as imperfect as they are."
He added that the courtroom is "the institution most essential to the preservation of human dignity" and chided that most "law school graduates can't find the courthouse with a compass.
The Dregs of the Bar
"Only the dregs of the American Bar for the past half century have been attracted to the defense of human liberty," Williams charged. He attributed three factors to the unpopularity of the field: the area is thought to be unremunerative, undignified, and unworthy of a lawyer's talent.
Admitting that the defense of civil liberties will continue to be unremunerative, Mr. Williams flayed the "invidious concept of guilt by client" and hit the current curricula of law schools "steeped in contracts, property and corporations" for discouraging intellectual interest.
Off on a Technicality
Citing a survey taken among high school students, he dramatized the present ignorance of the country concerning the application in practice of the Bill of Rights: One-half the students polled did not believe citizens had the right to peaceable assembly, the right against self-incrimination, the right to confront an accuser, the right against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the right not to be twice put in jeopardy -- yet all of the students polled professed they "believed" in the Bill of Rights.
"The great Constitutional principles have been forged in cases involving not very nice people," Mr. Williams reminded the audience. He criticized the "historical myopia" of people who worry about "guilty" men getting off on a "technicality," and warned that "When Big Government begins to infringe upon human liberties, it begins with the unpopular and ostracized because they can not rally public support."