Larry Tribe protects the Rule of Law at $5,000 an hour (est.)

That’s really more of a guess than an estimate but whatever.

The most improper aspect of Tribe’s behavior is his very public and continual insistence that he really believes the arguments he’s making. Here’s why those claims in particular are an abuse of his position: Under the rules of professional conduct, lawyers owe a duty of zealous advocacy to their clients. That means that, once Tribe agreed to represent Peabody Coal, he was, as a matter of professional ethics, obliged to make whatever legal arguments would, in his judgment, advance Peabody’s interests, without regard to whether he himself thinks those arguments are valid.

By officiously advertising the supposed sincerity of his arguments in favor of Peabody, Tribe is trying to have it both ways. Tribe is trying to advance Peabody’s legal interests by claiming that he’s not really trying to advance Peabody’s legal interests, but merely sharing the legal views held sincerely by Even Liberal Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe.

In other words, Tribe is claiming he’s not just a lawyer being paid to advance a client’s interests. But that is in fact exactly what he is, and indeed, under the circumstances, he would be violating the professional obligations he has chosen to incur if he were to be anything else (such as, for example, a disinterested constitutional law scholar, limiting himself to giving his sincere opinion regarding what the law requires).

I don’t care whether or not Tribe actually believes the arguments he’s making. After all, when somebody is being paid the stupendous sums Tribe is surely getting from Peabody Coal, that person’s evaluation of his own psychological sincerity is essentially worthless, precisely because if you pay a man enough to believe he believes what he says he believes, you’ll probably manage to get him to believe it eventually.

I do care that he’s trying to confuse the roles of an advocate and a scholar, in a way that improperly blurs the lines between those roles. That he is blurring those lines to better advance an especially bad policy outcome is both deeply irresponsible, and an abuse of the privileges of his academic position.