What if someone invaded my home, tortured and killed me? What would I want to happen?

I would want that person captured, tried and punished. But I would want one of my colleagues at the Bar to represent my murderer and I would want them to do the best job they could. /1

What if they had been motivated by something I had written?
Same answer.

By my politics or religion?
Same answer.

By my sex, race or sexual orientation?
Same answer.
/2

There are some who think that barristers defending cab rank over the past couple of days are arrogant and detached from reality. I disagree. I believe in a right to representation precisely because I *don't* think that the justice should bend to my interests. /3

Nor do I think it is detached from reality. We have seen many real world regimes experiment with fixing the system by denying representation. Right now there are regimes whose response to lawyers acting for victims of oppression is to arrest the lawyers. /4

Lawyers support a right to representation not because they live in a parallel universe of high principle but because they know what happens in this one when certain principles are abandoned. /5