Would the American Founding Father John Adams have been persecuted for representation of the "wrong clients" in our day and age?

I dedicated a lot of posts on this blog to the growing tendency of political persecution of attorneys - human rights defenders, and that occupational licensing of attorneys is used not for its intended use, protection of the public, but as a sword to destroy, in every possible way, attorneys who dare criticize misconduct of government officials on behalf of people whose civil rights are violated.

Recently, I wrote about assassinations - in many countries, including the U.S. - of human rights defenders, including attorneys.

Some attorneys flee from countries where they can be detained and murdered for their views, like civil rights attorneys are fleeing from China.

I also wrote about cowardly policies of the American Bar Association that "require" that "noble" institution to deny support to attorneys who are not "in good standing" in their countries.

That's why, apparently, the American Bar Association denied support to the Chinese civil rights attorney Dr. Teng Biao who immigrated into the U.S. from China to escape political persecution, when ABA pulled the plug on the book deal about civil rights activities that ABA first solicited from Dr. Teng Biao.

ABA takes the same cowardly position as to American attorneys disciplined for standing up for their clients - under ABA's policies, any attorney who is suspended or disbarred, no matter for what reasons, rightly or wrongly, is barred from acceptance into the ABA, even as a non-attorney member.

It has become a well-known fact that civil rights attorneys and criminal defense attorneys are disproportionately targeted with attorney discipline.

What happened to the attorney who brought successful police brutality lawsuits, who brought the first successful lawsuit on behalf of a Guantanamo bay detainee (detained for years without charges), who wrote treatises on federal practice, and who triggered impeachment proceedings against the most-reversed federal judge Manuel T. Real?

He was disbarred, of course.

What is happening to independent criminal defense attorneys?

They are persecuted, humiliated and discredited.

If they dare to step into civil court proceedings, they are sanctioned and suspended on the basis of amorphous court-created "rules of frivolous conduct".

It appears that, had our Founding Father John Adams lived and practiced today, he would have been suspended by now.

After all, he represented - successfully - soldiers and officers involved in the Boston massacre.

The gall!

And, after he was suspended or disbarred, John Adams would have been discredited as a politician and prevented from a political career - that's what is being done to attorneys who criticize the judiciary in the U.S. nowadays.

That is actually the true goal of current attorney regulation - to divide attorneys into "good" and "bad", to lure the obedient with the "golden cage" of monopoly for practice, and to punish those who bite the hand that purports to feed them - the judiciary.

Yet, don't we as a nation want our potential Founding Fathers (and Mothers) to not be beaten up for doing their jobs?

One thing is to pay lip services at history lessons and describe John Adams and his accomplishments.

Quite another is to provide true protection to those who do the same as John Adams did, now - representing unpopular clients, "sensitive" causes, and opposing the government.

If human rights defenders don't have such protection, human rights don't have such protections either.