I’ve heard this phrase before and have wondered if this is a universal opinion. It would seem to me that an accomplished lawyer - say a Bricker or a Gorsuch would be able to act as his own counsel in many situations.
A sidebar question that just occurred to me was if this is the case in the UK as well.
In situations like drawing up their own wills, perhaps. But when the attorney is charged with a crime, you want a dispassionate advocate to consider all the evidence and argue the best defense based on facts alone.
There’s a similar saying about physicians. You may convince yourself it’s just the flu, but another doctor would order an X-ray and discover cancer.
Besides the dispassion that kunilou correctly mentions, the simple reality is that the law is full of special niches. Criminal law is not civil law. How many Supreme Court justices have ever been the defense in a murder case? How many of them have been criminal defense lawyers at all?
Similarly, intellectual property law is not tax law is not estate law is not divorce law. Being bright or even brilliant doesn’t get you as far in many cases as twenty years of practical experience.
Mostly, the cliché that “An attorney who represents himself has a fool for a client” is based upon the fact that part of the attorney’s job is to make recommendations to the client, based upon a neutral review of the evidence and the applicable law, unaffected by the biases inherent in being the client in that situation. Thus, the attorney won’t be able to moderate his own desires by listening to the calming counsel of his counsel.
This could affect an attorney involved in a legal proceeding a number of different ways. Most probably, if the attorney is the plaintiff, listening to legal counsel other than his own might even mean that a suit is never filed.
This expression is really for lawyers doing things like drawing up complex financial agreements, incorporating a business, or defending against serious criminal charges. There’s nothing wrong with a lawyer representing himself for a speeding ticket, noise complaint, or small claims suit where the risk is less than the cost of hiring a lawyer anyway, or in filling out a standard power of attorney to finish a car sale. But for more serious agreements, the lawyer can’t be dispassionate because it’s his own case, may overlook angles that he ‘knows’ don’t apply because he’s involved, and may be outside of his own area of expertise.
Not to side track, but what do you mean by this? In all my car purchases, I’ve never had an attorney get involved.
Neither have I, but there’s often a power of attorney form to let them amend the title documents if there’s some kind of error. It’s a very short doc that says very clearly what it’s for so you don’t normally involve an attorney, but it is a legal document that serves as an example of something you don’t have an attorney get involved in that an attorney wouldn’t drag in their own lawyer for either.
Depends on what kinds of vehicle transactions you do.
For example, in my state the DMV does not issue paper certificates of title if there is a lienholder; those are held electronically. Therefore, if I want to trade in a vehicle on which there is a lien, the standard process would be for me to give the dealer a power of attorney, and with that the dealer can obtain the lien release and a certificate of title in order to complete the sale to the next purchaser.
I always thought that saying was talking about people who aren’t attorneys trying to represent themselves in court.
Right, and I’ve done it many times, but no attorney was ever involved just a form from the dealership.
Seconded.
None of the current justices, at least at the trial level. The closest surprisingly appears to be John Roberts, who did some pro bono habeus or appellate work on a death penalty case (albeit very limited). Alito was a federal prosecutor for a few years and Sotomayor was a state prosecutor in NYC for a few years.
These days, confirmed Supreme Court justices tend to be federal appellate judges and have limited criminal trial experience, exclusively from the prosecution side. The last Supreme Court justice with any substantive criminal defense experience (though appellate) seems to have been Abe Fortas, who was only a justice under LBJ for a few years before he resigned in an ethics scandal. Fortas argued the Gideon v. Wainwright case before the Supreme Court for Gideon, which expanded the requirement that the Government provide legal counsel to defendants in both federal and state criminal cases.
Also, under the criminal rules of evidence in most U.S. states and on the federal level, the statements of a party opponent (i.e. the defendant) are not considered hearsay and thus can be introduced as evidence by anyone testifying as a prosecution witness who heard the defendant say them or otherwise authenticated by a witness if there is an actual audio/video/written statement. When someone represents themselves in a criminal capacity, any stray comment about their actions, motives, inactions, etc. could suddenly come into play. The statements of their defense attorney are not subject to this same rule and therefore the defense attorney can make any and all kinds of pre-trial statements about the facts or arguments via motions without having to worry about a jury considering those statements as evidence against their client.
For example, if a defendant (even one who was a lawyer) was questioning a witness testifying in a pretrial hearing about some evidentiary issue and the defendant made certain assertions about their own personal whereabouts at the time of the alleged crime during cross-examination or during the motions argument, those statements could potentially be introduced against them at trial, particularly if there were any inconsistencies whatsoever. A non-defendant defense attorney who made those same pre-trial assertions and arguments would not have to worry about their words being used against them at trial in this way.
Ganthet hit it out of the park.
That’s the main reason: you lose a LOT of legal protections when you represent yourself in criminal cases, especially. Being unbiased is the very LEAST of concerns.
The classic “Were you wearing your glasses when you saw me committing the crime?” blunder.
This. If I got charged with 1st degree mopery, I might start looking into Blackstone’s Commentary on Mopery and want to gather a pitchfork army to storm the castle of the state to fight the injustice.
A dispassionate advocate might point out that I was indeed guilty of 2nd degree mopery, work out a plea deal for a fine only for involuntary mopery and let me go home.
On my own, I might cause myself big troubles.
Sotomayor was a prosecutor in New York County (Manhattan) for, I think, four or five years, and then was with a New York law firm for another seven or eight years. And then she was a District Court judge for six years before being appointed to the Circuit Court.
She probably has an enormous amount of trial experience. Perhaps not criminal defense experience, but lawyers tell me that criminal trial experience is pretty much the same whether you’re a prosecutor or a defense lawyer.
And she would have presided over more trials, both criminal and civil, than most lawyers see in a lifetime as a District Court judge.
Thanks for the detailed replies. It’s a good thing i was not being charged by the hour. 
doesn’t it mean you’ve basically set aside most of your 5th Amendment rights?
As a former state prosector and former criminal defense attorney, I can tell you that while much of the overall process is very similar (conducting direct examinations/cross-examinations, opening statements, closing arguments) on both sides, the difference in mentality is vast. No matter what, a prosecutor who has never been a defense attorney can only imagine what it is like. While prosecutors (or the charging attorneys if they didn’t charge the case themselves) set the stage by deciding wht charges to bring forward/seek indictment on, defense attorneys get to pick the point of attack. Prosecutors are responsible for proving every element of a charged crime by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. So, defense counsel only have to focus on one relatively weaker element to try to beat a given charge. Having a living, breathing criminal defendant who is counting on you is a lot different than representing the state and only working with (but not representing) police officers and victims is night and day.
Anyway, the whole point and importance of at least one justice having been a criminal defense counsel at some point in their careers is that the Court decides huge constitutional law issues that can have a profound impact on many people’s rights and freedoms to a much larger extent than many civil constitional, business, or other issues. Having just a bunch of prosecution hacks on the Court tends to mean that the Court will bend over backwards to either justify, excuse, or otherwise deem immaterial misconduct or overreaching by prosecutors (which seems to be Clarence Thomas’s entire mission statement). While having only those with prosecution experience in criminal law does not guarantee they are a prosecution hack/inherently pro-prosecution, as Sotomayor had demonstrated with her more balanced approach, it does make it at least somewhat more likely.