Thread by @Ls4Ca

Let's talk about legal ethics.

Many firms say that when they rep fossil fuel companies they're promoting access to representation. This is self-serving manipulation of legal ethics

What they are really doing is tipping the playing field further towards climate polluters (1/9)

Law firms choose their clients--no one makes them rep fossil fuel companies. Even for existing clients, ABA Rule 1.16 authorizes withdrawal if "the client insists upon taking action that the lawyer considers repugnant or with which the lawyer has a fundamental disagreement" (2/9)

Lawyers of conscience should have a fundamental disagreement with the fossil fuel industry's business model of condemning future generations to suffer on an increasingly uninhabitable planet (3/9)

Lawyers also may disclose the climate-related dangers of their fossil fuel clients' activities. ABA Rule 1.6(b)(1) allows disclosure "to prevent reasonably certain death or substantial bodily harm," which climate change produces on a mass scale (4/9) news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-an…

More broadly, elite law firms provide excellent representation, and it matters who gets access to their services. Fossil fuel companies aren't entitled to an army of elite lawyers because they have made billions burning more fossil fuels than a stable climate can survive (5/9)

Elite law firms have an even weaker case when they conduct transactions + lobbying for fossil fuel companies. There's no such thing as a right to a pipeline or a lobbyist. Outside of litigation, they can't even claim to be neutral actors in an adversarial system (6/9)

Even in litigation, these are civil cases. If elite law firms really cared about access to justice, they would represent low-income Americans, for whom 86% of their civil legal needs go unmet

Let's be real--representing fossil fuel companies is about profits, not justice (7/9)

Even if every law firm stopped representing fossil fuel companies, the companies would still have dozens of in-house lawyers to turn to.

This situation could not be further from guaranteeing the constitutional rights of indigent criminal defendants (8/9)

Whether fossil fuel companies should have access to representation isn't the question at issue

The question is whether elite law firms should help fossil fuel companies game the system and continuing driving humanity towards climate disaster. The only ethical answer is no (9/9)