My career as a defense attorney specializing in sex crimes started in 2004, during my first night arraignment shift at the old Criminal Court building on Schermerhorn Street in downtown Brooklyn. Two details of that night are fixed in my memory. First, the rats. Second, the pile of sex offense cases, each marked with a neon orange warning sticker. The clerk had set them aside because none of the lawyer who who worked the previous shift wanted those cases. I grabbed that pile and clutched it to my chest.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Our constitutional rights are only as strong as the ones we are willing to extend to the least popular defendants.

In 2019, Harvard professor Ronald Sullivan joined Harvey Weinstein’s criminal defense team. This sparked intense student protests at Harvard. Sullivan quit, but Harvard decided not to renew his (and his wife Stephanie Robinson’s) positions as faculty deans of Winthrop House anyway. It’s not like he lost his job job, but the move still sparked a lot of debate. “To the degree we deny unpopular defendants basic due process rights we cease to be the country we imagine ourselves to be, ” Sullivan wrote at the time. It later emerged he had failed to file income taxes for 9 years in a row, but that is perhaps a bit off topic.