Edward Bennett Williams Quotes

Government lawyers, like private ones, face the problem routinely of aiding in the defense and development of positions in whose correctness they don't believe.

Your lawyer is your true mercenary. Under his code honor consists in making the best possible fight in exchange for the biggest possible fee. He is frankly for sale to the highest bidder.

Lawyers have to make a living, and can only do so by inducing people to believe that a straight line is crooked.

I fire lawyers frequently.

I get paid for seeing that my clients have every break the law allows. I have knowingly defended a number of guilty men. But the guilty never escape unscathed. My fees are sufficient punishment for anyone.

You have plaintiffs attorneys, you have defense attorneys. So there is no unified bar that will protect a particular judge who has made a courageous decision that's unpopular.

Lawyers claim that their clients have been grossly mistreated, which is what criminal defense lawyers are paid to do.

My role in it was not as central as it was in some of the later cases considering I was younger then and I was playing a role of co-counsel on the case.

Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.

What are you supposed to do - stop practicing law whenever one of your friends becomes president?

For me, I don't participate in the filming when I represent a reality show star in a case, because that would mean waiving my right to attorney-client privilege, and that would hamper my ability to mount an effective case.

The houses of lawyers are roofed with the skins of litigants.

The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

A lawyer wants to get his client off the hook. And even if he knows the client is guilty, he is going to find ways and means of getting him off the hook.

Any litigator will tell you that adding to your legal team on the eve of trial most likely will not produce better lawyering but, rather, chaos.

The only thing the defense has to do is take care of the client and see to it that they attack every weak spot on the prosecution's case. It's up to the judge to make sure that they don't pull any fast ones.

I see how attorneys are, and nobody is really on your side. It's about money. The attorney is not chasing after your money; he's chasing after his fee.

There's a black lawyer in Galveston, Texas, who was the unpaid NAACP general counsel in Texas. He had a great record in housing discrimination, labor discrimination. He decided to take as a client a member of the Ku Klux Klan because the state wanted to get the membership lists of the Klan to find out if they could get something on the Klan. And he said, 'I got to take you. I despise you. But we, the NAACP, won that case; NAACP vs. Alabama in the 1950s. Nobody has the right to get your membership lists.' He was fired from the NAACP. To me, he's a hero.

Apparently it was unethical for lawyers to sleep with their clients. This from a man who offered legal representation to assassins.

It's the duty of a lawyer to represent anyone for whom a responsible argument could be made.

As a defense lawyer, he refused to condemn his clients. Everyone else in the system-the cops, the prosecutors, the juries and judges-would take care of that; they didn't need his help.

[Alan] Dershowitz has also offered to defend Osama bin Laden in court, saying it would be an act of high patriotism. It's kind of too bad there isn't going to be a trial. Having Dershowitz defend him could be Osama's only shot at not being the least popular person in the courtroom.

In my previous life I was a civil attorney. At one point I truly believed that was what I wanted to be- but that was before I'd been handed a fistful of crushed violets from a toddler. Before I understood that the smile of a child is a tattoo: indelible art.

Such professions as the soldier and the lawyer ... give ample opportunity for crimes but not much for mere illusions. ... If you have lost a battle you cannot believe you have won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have gotten him off.

When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks.