I don't know the facts about who Holder defended beyond what I have read here, but I do believe there is an ethical difference between choosing to become a lawyer the bulk of whose time is spent defending corporations, and choosing to become, say, a public defender (who make up a large portion of those "defending" the prisoners in Guantanamo).

Many of the lawyers who represent Guantanamo detainees are lawyers who work for corporate law firms, who have taken those cases on a pro bono basis. Many of the "War on Terror" litigations have involved enormous resources to prosecute and I guarantee you that every lawyer at the ACLU, the CCR and other places will tell you that the willingness of partners at large corporate law firms to take these cases has been crucial in enabling them to be pursued.

No argument. I don't deny that many corporate lawyers do good pro bono work, and that lawyers at the ACLU who specialize in such good works are grateful for this essential help. But the very logic that suggests that corporate lawyers get moral credit for this work implies that those who choose to pursue this work full-time get more credit.

Public defenders, in my experience, defend out of a deeply felt belief that, although most of their clients may in fact be guilty of their accused crime, their treatment by the state and the likely degree of punishment is deeply unjust. Corporate lawyers I've known present no such moral justifications for their jobs, and usually do it just as part of a self-interested career.

This is way too generalized to be meaningful. Some public defenders are as idealistic as you claim, but others hate their jobs but took stay there because it is all they could get, or because they see it as a stepping stone for doing something else, or because they don't want to work long hours. There's plenty of self-interest among every strain of lawyer, including public defenders.

This too is true, but I had in mind public defenders who do the job because they chose to -- as I presume Holder had a choice, and as I presume most corporate lawyer could have chosen. The point isn't who was forced to take a public defender job, the point is who chose to take a corporate job instead. I personally know few public defenders who took the job because of the hours or as a stepping stone, but in any event, I was comparing the choice between defending corporations, and defending the under-classes, a choice almost every corporate lawyer had the opportunity to make.

Moreover, while Holder has been a partner in a large law firm, he has spent much of his career as a government lawyer. He's about to take an enormous pay cut -- going from DC law firm partner to AG -- and undoubtedly made far less than he could have in the private sector all those years when he was a DC Circuit Judge, a U.S. Attorney, and Justice Department official. Lawyers like him who work for the government do so at great financial sacrifice. That doesn't mean it's magnanimous -- lots of people trade money for power -- but it's nowhere near as clean and simplistic as you suggest.

I think this just agrees with my point --there are many personal reasons to prefer the remunerations of corporate work, and furthermore, you get a bit less moral credit for doing work defending the poor if it's in some high-prestige government position or, like Edwards, you mainly take jobs that make you lots of money. None of this is to say that all lawyers of type X do it for reasons Y, but until we learn more about a specific person, we can use this logic to make inferences in expectation.

Finally, it doesn't matter what the motive is. Lots of criminal defense lawyers represent accused criminals for money or other self-interested reasons. But it's still a vital service they're performing, and it's just wrong to suggest that the sins of a client can be attributed to the lawyer.

I realize that this is the dominant dogma of the legal trade, but nevertheless, I have talked to many law students who are facing a decision about what professional route to take when they graduate -- where every role they might take is equally vital -- and many see their choices as being between the more moral but less remunerative public defense, working for one of the firms that have lots of pro bono time or more ethical cases, or working for firms that do mostly pure corporate work. And just as they realize that this an important and far-reaching moral decision for them to make, so I feel justified in judging them -- and making guesses about their potential later ethical decisions -- based on this decision and ones like it that they make throughout their careers.

The point is, lawyers like Holder can choose whether to take a vital and remunerative route or the equally vital, morally rewarding but often less remunerative route. The very fact that corporate firms makes time for and reward pro bono work shows how broadly this basic moral outlook is shared. The fact that there are many specific exceptions to this broad pattern doesn't diminish the inferences it allows absent more specific information.