Lambda's Marketplace Power

Jonathan Watson asks some good questions about my praise for the Harvard Lambda students who are, in my view, exercising their marketplace power to make firms accountable for the causes they take on.  He asks:

Since the students in question are not hiring Ropes & Gray (and therefore, don't have marketplace power in that sense) do you mean that they are attempting to force Ropes & Gray to reconsider, or else be forced to do without members of the Lambda student organization? That makes no logical sense to me either, since they could simply refuse to interview or apply for positions with R&G.  I am curious how you would use this incident to illustrate the need for lawyers to take moral responsibility for their professional decisions? How does this relate to "moral responsibility" versus informed moral responsibility, and (in light of Prof. Araujo's comments about R&G also doing work for Gay and Lesbian groups) irresponsible or illogical moral responsibility?

When I refer to marketplace power, I'm not simply talking about the decision by individual students to seek employment with a firm doing work to which they object.  I'm talking about the persuasive power of students banding together to convince their classmates not to seek employment with such a firm.  By contrast, if the students were seeking to have Harvard exclude Ropes & Gray from on-campus interviews entirely because of the firm's work for Catholic Charities, I would not consider that to be an exercise of marketplace power so much as shutting the marketplace down.

And to be clear, I believe that Lambda's targeting of Ropes & Gray is misguided in this context given the nature of the legal claims at stake, regardless of one's view on the merits of gay adoption.  But the fact that R&G also represents gay and lesbian causes doesn't erase the moral dimension.  If a firm agreed to help an anti-Christian employer find creative ways to get rid of Christian employees without incurring liability, I would find that representation objectionable (especially if the firm took it on as a pro bono matter) regardless of the firm's other socially beneficial representations. 

And I do not mean to belittle the value of the access to the law afforded by lawyers, a clear benefit of the amoral lawyering paradigm.  But we are far from the point where individuals and groups lack access due to the controversial moral nature of their causes (lack of access for financial reasons is another story); the more pressing problem is that lawyers are trained to believe that the moral nature of the cause is irrelevant to the representation.  If a firm devoted its pro bono resources to bringing cases that would seek to expand the abortion license through envelope-pushing challenges to parental notification laws and other legislative restrictions, would a pro-life law student be justified in declining an interview with the firm?  Of course.  But would they also be justified in trying to bring their classmates' attention to the firm's allocation of its limited resources?  Absolutely, and that's the exercise of marketplace power I applaud. 

Rob