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While there are nuances to it, most laws today violate rights. Government and law regulate many or most aspects of trade, business and everyday life. As a practising lawyer one is hired in to represent a range of businesses and individuals. In the case that the objective is to defend the individual or company from Government claims, or as a plaintiff against Government, either it be in criminal or civil law, it is morally consistent to defend the individual or company. However, many legal disputes are of the civil kind where businesses meet individuals, businesses meet businesses or individuals meet individuals. Let's assume the laws in the following cases violate rights, i.e. they would not exist in the ideal Objectivist laissez-faire system. In the case that one's client is the defendant, I think it is a moral practise of the lawyer. This is basically due to the fact that one then is helping the defendant to avoid laws to be enforced onto the defendant, laws which ultimately are threats of coercive violence and a coercion that is not the result of that the defendant has infrigned the plaintiff's individual rights. However, in the case of being the plaintiff, one is trying to make sure the defendant is effectively bowing to these threats of coercion. Is this moral?
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I agree with FCH, but I figured I'd put it as an answer rather than a comment, even though the substance is the same (I hate to see those unanswered questions! ;-) Yes, it is immoral to be an accessory to a rights violation. Note, also the related problem (which I think raises its ugly head much more frequently) of asserting a valid law frivolously. I believe this is also immoral. Also, it sounded like you thought only plaintiffs' attorneys or government prosecutors were susceptible to wielding rights violating laws to the detriment of others; that anything a defense attorney did was essentially okay because they were defending someone from coercive government power (if I am wrong on that, please correct me). Note that there are many rights-violating laws that can be asserted as a defense by defendants---I'll give you two examples out of many possibilities: first, defendants accused of infringing a patent very often assert the defense that the patent is invalid because it violates the anti-trust laws (which are obviously horrendous laws); second, in modern contract law many perfectly valid contracts will be nullified because the parties had unequal "bargaining power." In such cases a person with a legitimate claim will not be compensated because a bad law was used by a defendant. This to me is just as bad as a plaintiff wielding bad law on the offensive, because a harmed individual has a right to redress of his injuries, and that redress has been thwarted by bad law. As for FCH's musings about a law that would violate one party's rights if not asserted, but would also violate the other party's rights if it is asserted, I cannot think of any real laws that do so (I can think of laws that are unfair to both parties, but that is not the same thing). An imaginary law that might fit the bill would be any law that requires a party to assert a bad claim against another party or suffer a penalty themselves. For example, in the realm of anti-trust, one could easily imagine a law requiring a party who knows about potentially collusive behavior to initiate a lawsuit charging an anti-trust violation based on that behavior, or be charged as an accessory if they don't (essentially this would conscript citizens into helping the government enforce the unjust law or be persecuted themselves). Think perhaps of a hypothetical situation where zonings laws allow either certain types of buildings or others, but not both in the same area. Now if your client has an interest in building type A, then it is in your interest to make sure the law allows type A, but not type B buildings, even though this violates the rights of other landowners who might wish to build type B. Of course, it wouldn't be directly in your interest do BAN type B buildings, which is the rights-violating part, but I wouldn't be surprised if the law made such "your rights vs mine"-tradeoffs necessary... "As for FCH's musings about a law that would violate one party's rights if not asserted, but would also violate the other party's rights if it is asserted, I cannot think of any real laws that do so" I don't know if this qualifies, but sometimes in order to convince the IRS that payments someone received were not taxable income, one has to simultaneously convince them that they were not properly deductible by the payer. So, if you're successful, your client's tax bill goes down, and someone else's goes up. Another tax-related example would be a dispute about whether someone is properly classified as an employee or subcontractor for tax purposes. If they are an employee, half the social security and medicare taxes are due by the employer. If they are a contractor, they have to pay both halves. If there is no clear agreement one way or the other, then once again you're in a situation where getting your client's tax bill to go down results in making someone else's tax bill go up.
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This is not a full answer, but I would point out that there are no "Objectivist" laws (nor are there "non-Objectivist" laws). There are only rights-respecting and -upholding laws, and rights-violating laws. And if you consider it from this angle (that upholding these laws violates rights), then I can certainly see how it would be immoral to do so. But I'm open to be persuaded otherwise.
Thanks for your reply, FCH. I edit the short-form question to reflect what you said.
I suppose an answer would look somewhat like this: yes, it is immoral on principle, if you are abetting a rights-violation. The only exception I could think of is a situation where the law is so badly perverted that either way, somebody rights are violated, in which case I can see how it could be moral to see to it that your client (or yourself) does not get the short end of the stick. I can't think of a succinct example, though. I hope whoever tries to give a real answer could come up with one! (If they agree with my analysis in the first place, of course.)
Yes, it would appear to be a bad thing to enforce an immoral law, but Abraham Lincoln said something very interesting. He said, "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly."