II. Defending Everyone to Defend Democracy
In 1954, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy denounced, in Newsweek, a City Bar member as a defender of Communists, the Association’s President, Bethuel M. Webster, responded in a letter to the editor that “the right to counsel requires public acceptance of the correlative right of a lawyer to represent and defend, in accordance with the standards of the bar, any client without having imputed to him his client’s reputation, views or character.” At the City Bar, it has always gone without saying that the right to a defense, and therefore to a lawyer, is sacrosanct.

