ABSTRACT
In today’s world of moral uncertainty one needs to raise questions about the justice-seeking activities of lawyers. How is it possible to be a moral lawyer and how is it possible to be a lawyer and a moral being? These questions tend to be answered by invoking political realities. What constitutes injustice or immorality is likely to relate to reference points along a political continuum where democracy is being denied, power abused, rights ignored or overridden. From the legal perspective, the role of law becomes in essence one of rectifying such irregularities and, where appropriate, punishing such illegality and preventing and deterring its future occurrence. Legal morality for those active in the field of human rights is seen to proceed, therefore, through a process of redressing unlawful imbalances o f power and so of promoting or restoring the world to a state of equilibrium and legality. As with retributionist justifications for making immoral acts crimes, law and morality are seen as reinforcing each other with law reinforcing and intensifying the opprobrium with which the immoral act is regarded.1
