Lawfare quotes from Jonathan Hafetz's thoughtful reflections on the strategic choices made by the cause lawyers working to represent detainees. If you teach PR and are looking for a way to introduce the tension between lawyering for a cause and lawyering for a client, you might think about Hafetz's piece. Excerpts:
As lawyers, our primary duty is to our clients not to broader principles. And, on behalf of those clients, we believed it was most critical to win the battle for habeas. But, in the end, the extensive focus on habeas had costs for our clients as well as for those principles.
Perhaps it would not have mattered. Perhaps we obtained all we could have from the courts and that, by insisting on more, we would have wound up with less. But we should have tried. In the battle over Guantánamo, habeas lawyers remain to some extent the victims of our own success.