Mukasey Tells Grads Lawyer’s Job Is ‘Dispassionate and Reasoned Analysis’

Attorney General Michael Mukasey told Boston College law graduates on Friday that a lawyer’s job is to offer clients "dispassionate and reasoned analysis" of legal issues.

"If you do your job well, there will be times when you will have to advise clients that the law prohibits them from doing things that they want to do … [or] the right thing to do," Mukasey said, according to an account by the Boston Globe. "And there will be times when you will have to advise clients that the law permits them to take actions that you may find imprudent or even wrong."

The law school’s invitation to Mukasey had sparked controversy. Twenty-two law professors sent the attorney general a letter asking him to withdraw as a commencement speaker. The professors said the controversy over the legality of waterboarding had made him a symbol of administration policies that conflict with international law.

Mukasey acknowledged that lawyers face especially difficult decisions in cases involving national security. "Nowhere are the stakes higher and the pressures greater,” he said. "You must do law even—you must do law especially—when the stakes are high and the pressures to do something else are tremendous," he said in his speech.

Mukasey mentioned former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith five times in his speech, saying Goldsmith's book The Terror Presidency was indispensable in highlighting the timid atmosphere prevailing among government attorneys before the Sept. 11 attacks, reports The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times.

Goldsmith, now a Harvard law professor, says in the book that he resigned from his Justice Department job in 2004 in hopes that his withdrawal of two controversial memos on interrogation of terrorism suspects would stick.

Mukasey defended government attorneys who wrote the memos, saying the criticism of them has been “hostile and unforgiving.” He said the lawyers should not face liability or criminal charges, the Associated Press reports.

“Ignored is the fact that, by all accounts I have seen or heard, including but not limited to Jack Goldsmith’s book, those lawyers reached their conclusions in good faith based upon their best judgments of what the law required,” he said.