Defining "Amoral Attorney"

Courtesy link.

So the description is pretty broad, but basically it seems to characterizes lawyers as ranging from Lawful Neutral Punch-Clock Villain to Lawful Neutral Punch-Clock Hero. Yet in the quotations thread when I proposed switching quotations, I was told the current one is quite in line with the characterization of attorneys as willing to be criminals if there is a profit to be made. Which is it? Does it refer to them as Lawful Neutral or as willing to resort to breaking the law instead?

Edited by neoYTPism on May 11th 2022 at 11:28:35 AM

Trying to force examples to fit Character Alignment is a fool's errand (Lawful Neutral, along with its friends is Flame Bait because it's inapplicable to so many works).

Basically it's just "bad lawyer", let that be from "willing to take a bribe or two" to "comically evil supervillain masterminding an entire Government Conspiracy of Kangaroo Courts". "Amoral" provides Added Alliterative Appeal.

So then what distinguishes this trope from Ambulance Chaser, then?

And do we have a trope for lawyers who feel ethically bound to legal ethics, but also feel that this doesn't include (and/or even flies in the face of) turning down clients over feeling moral indignation at said clients' actions? (Or is that concept just not tropeworthy?)

And should Lawful Neutral be in the meantime removed from the trope description?

Ambulance Chaser is an incompetent prosecutor who takes advantage of people who need to sue others. Amoral Attorney is, at least according to Ambulance Chaser's own description, the much more serious defense attorney variant who willfully helps criminals get off.

Edited by WarJay77 on May 11th 2022 at 9:24:43 AM

To me the name is somewhat confusing. Amoral means someone who lacks a moral code. They could do good or evil, but they aren't concerned with the morality of their actions. The example that springs to mind is a courtroom drama (I'm not going to name it because I'm getting into spoilers) where an attorney tries to defend a man accused of murder. The man is acquitted, but admits to having committed the crime. He's then killed by his wife. His attorney then makes a comment that the wife is going to be his next client. The point is that he saw himself as someone who was just doing his job.

The page image is a prosecutor, so that defense attorney bit may, uh, need to be clarified.

But generally, Ambulance Chaser does frivolous and not all that meritorious cases but not necessary illegal/shady/corrupt/evil.

The trope description also mentions both defense attorneys and prosecutors.

Amoral Attorney is any legal professional who will manipulate or even break the law in order to achieve their goals. This ranges from putting up enough legal red tape to make their evil client untouchable, to being the one scheduling out fixers to take care of bad situations their clients get into. An Ambulance Chaser is a pre-existing term regarding a strip mall type lawyer who makes their living searching for clients in a position for a quick settlement (ie someone who was just in an accident and heading to the hospital in an ambulance).

If that's the case, then "amoral" is a misnomer. "Immoral" would be more accurate.

"Amoral" gives the impression; and quite reasonably so; that it's referring to lawyers doing their job regardless of their "moral feeling" about what their client is alleged to have; or in some cases admits to having; done.

Ironically, in their profession, it'd be considered unethical to do otherwise.

So with the distinction from Ambulance Chaser clarified, what then distinguishes this from Evil Lawyer Joke?

Based admittedly on a quick look at the page, the description doesn't seem to indicate that this describes an attorney willing to break the law—or at least not as a defining point. Indeed, it says:

The general idea seems to be of a lawyer who's willing to fight unfairly in order to win, and who is willing to take on distinctly unpleasant clients.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on May 16th 2022 at 9:51:59 PM

The name was for alliterative appeal, it even says in the description that lawyers are technically supposed to be amoral in the sense that their job is not to take a personal moral stance and to simply interpret the law as written.

But the thing is that "lawyer who does his job" is not a trope, while Rules Lawyer is for the type of person, lawyer or otherwise, who obsessively dissects the rules to get their way legitimately. The spirit of the trope surrounds a lawyer who uses the system as a weapon against good people.

Yes, but this is not-uncommonly presented as a bad thing, and exaggerated.

Pretty much—but that's not the same as being willing to break the law.

No, but "a lawyer doing their job is depicted in a highly negative light" is a trope, as is "a lawyer taking things to the point of cruelty", or "a lawyer having no qualms about who they represent, and this being shown as a villainous trait".

but that last point would be a different kind of trope. from this thread there are a few interpretations of the trope based on the title and the description

• a lawyer that takes on any client without caring about whether the client is morally good or ethically in the right
  • the issue is that this is basically what a lawyer is.
• a lawyer who will do whatever it takes to help their client, even if that includes breaking the law
• the depiction of lawyers as evil or bad specifically because of their lack of bias in who they serve

first two are character tropes, the third is more of a theme / concept trope. given that this is written as a character trope, I don't think it was intended to be 3, but that might be the tropeable version of the trope. And 2 is also tropeable and I think what this trope has devolved into because of people interpreting "amoral" differently than intended

Hmm... The thing is, I suspect that works somewhat conflate the points that I described: that they take a lawyer being willing to represent someone who's unpleasant or guilty, conclude that this represents a moral absence on the part of the lawyer, and so extrapolate to what other things a lawyer acting without morality might do.

I'm speculating there, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if those points tend to occur in works together to some degree.

^Yes. The conflation is in Good Lawyers, Good Clients, ergo a lawyer who enthusiastically takes on a bad person as a client must be bad themselves. Legal dramas might occasionally have the heroic lawyers have a bad client for some moral dilemmas or plot twists, but that's it.

The description of GLGC does point out that in real life lawyers can't afford to be as picky, but fiction likes to ascribe morality to its cases.

Edited by Synchronicity on May 20th 2022 at 10:33:44 AM

In any case, the point remains that unless the trope refers to it not being a lawyer's job to weigh in on the morality of what their client supposedly did or didn't do, "amoral" is still a misnomer.

"Added Alliterative Appeal" is not enough reason to make a trope name that misleading.

You're not really wrong, but we're stuck with it unless this gets taken to TRS, and that's assuming it's causing any actual problems.