All of these arguments make what I think is a false assumption: that all cases will be tried in the courts, and the main thing is to make the courts more unbiased in deciding cases brought to them. If you make it harder to defense attorneys to defend the guilty, then the guilty will go to greater lengths to avoid being brought to court in the first place. That could mean a whole lot of things in practice, with effects pointing in many directions. I don’t know what they all add up to. Maybe not much of anything, but I’d find that very surprising.
Edit to add: changing this norm could also have some… potentially interesting… effects when applied to civil disobedience and unjust laws. If lawyers can be held accountable for knowingly defending the guilty, what happens to the ACLU? What would have happened to the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement?
All of these arguments make what I think is a false assumption: that all cases will be tried in the courts, and the main thing is to make the courts more unbiased in deciding cases brought to them. If you make it harder to defense attorneys to defend the guilty, then the guilty will go to greater lengths to avoid being brought to court in the first place. That could mean a whole lot of things in practice, with effects pointing in many directions. I don’t know what they all add up to. Maybe not much of anything, but I’d find that very surprising.
Edit to add: changing this norm could also have some… potentially interesting… effects when applied to civil disobedience and unjust laws. If lawyers can be held accountable for knowingly defending the guilty, what happens to the ACLU? What would have happened to the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement?