Julian Sanchez makes an extremely relevant point with regard to the smears of the nine lawyers at the Department of Justice who represented Guantanamo Bay detainees:
Many of them were, to put it mildly, unsympathetic characters whose “values” I would not want to be “shared” by high-ranking attorneys in the Justice Department. Fortunately, competent attorneys argued both sides of those cases, not because of their personal feelings about the defendants, but because the legal questions at the hearts of those cases had larger implications for the kind of country we're going to live in. And our constitutional order works, when it does, because the Court is directed to the full range of core issues involved by thoughtful advocates who present them forcefully and clearly.
Sanchez lists several cases involving unsavory clients that secured freedoms for Americans as a whole. To these we might add Near v. Minnesota, the case outlawing prior restraint of the press by the government. At the center of that case were Jay M. Near and Howard A. Guilford, the publishers of a racist, anti-Semitic newspaper who nevertheless played a role in solidifying Marc Thiessen's inalienable right to smear attorneys in the Justice Department without the government being able to silence him.
-- A. Serwer
