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Alan, the thing you still misunderstand about legal practice—which you avoided confronting via appellate work and jurisdiction-hopping case-to-case—is that the most effective advocates develop integrity and decency alongside advocacy skills. You never taught us that—you couldn't.
1/ As a boy, I was too logical. My dad would admonish me by saying, "That's *very* logical." He was saying that always expecting a logical result is an error. A lawyer not working a case who voices every argument he can logically make somehow forgot to become human along the way.
2/ A sufficiently erudite attorney can plausibly make any argument. You know this, Alan—you educated 3 generations of top U.S. lawyers. How is it you never learned there are some arguments logic allows that are unjust and preclusively repugnant? It's a fatal flaw that shames you.
3/ Either your arguments about rape and statutory rape are you working your *own* case in public—and implicitly confessing to vile crimes—or you're electively peddling a morally grotesque argument about 14 and 15 year-old girls that's completely gratuitous, and therefore risible.
4/ The New Yorker quoted another of my former professors, Charles Fried, who says—even in acknowledging some friendship with you—that you were/are easily seduced by the finer things in life. I wonder if you realize what a weak, morally schlocky figure you pose to former students.
5/ I'm now a teacher myself. My classes aren't classes in morality—yet I can't imagine teaching without feeling a responsibility to both educate in an ethical way and to imbue the subjects I educate upon with ethical dimensions. You've failed and are failing as an educator, Alan.
6/ You told us a lawyer on a case has an obligation to go right up to the line of unethical conduct—and an obligation to never cross it. With Epstein, you crossed the line; in your current argument, you're not working a case and so can afford to be a human being. You've declined.
