Lawyers Should Do No Harm

The first rule of medicine is Do No Harm. The same should apply to lawyers.

There are gradations of circumstances in which this rule comes into play. Cut off a gangrenous toe to save a leg is not a harm. Cutting off a terrorist from destroying thousands of lives is not a harm.

Two former U.S. Attorney Generals and a former Director of the CIA and FBI, serving Democrat and Republican administrations, speak to that in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Surveillance Sanity.”

The government alone cannot protect us from the threats we face today. We must have the help of all our citizens. There will be times when the lives of thousands of Americans will depend on whether corporations such as airlines or banks are willing to lend assistance. If we do not treat companies fairly when they respond to assurances from the highest levels of the government that their help is legal and essential for saving lives, then we will be radically reducing our society's capacity to defend itself.

Instead, ambulance-chasing fee hounds and other lawyers whose conception of America is akin to Nazi Germany want to sue telecommunications and other deep-pocket companies for cooperating in the first lines of our defenses.

Immunity is designed to avoid the burden of protracted litigation, because the prospect of such litigation itself is enough to deter citizens from providing critically needed assistance.

The Democrats’ attacks upon and weakening of our defenses take the occasion of redefining FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) and trying to commit the next Attorney General to unilaterally and contrary to law forbidding certain legitimate interrogation techniques when urgent.

Lawyers must first be citizens instead of searching for ways to do harm to the citizenry.