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LE GAL E THICS BY PHILIP SLAYTON draw the line Where to marshals the appropriate law. It con- tains a dollop or two of common sense and a measure of worldly experience. From this brew comes the "opinion" itself, a well-considered, amply sup- ported legal conclusion that commands respect and can be relied on by the client who asked (and generally paid) for it. It is ethically inspired and seeks the truth so far as it can be found. It is professionalism at its best. This is what we lawyers aspire to. Or do we? Some skeptics think the legal opinion A has become just another commodity, tailored to the needs of the consum- er, bought and sold in a competitive marketplace like any other product. Regard for ethics and the legal truth, these critics say, has been lost. Exhibit A for this point of view is the so-called "torture memos," a series of legal opinions written between 2002 and 2007 by lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel at the United States Department of Justice, all justifying a wide variety of CIA techniques used in interrogating al-Qaida suspects. The techniques included menacing a suspect with a power drill, and threatening to rape his mother and kill his children. All of these tech- niques were legal, said the memos, most of which can now be seen on a variety of web sites, including that of the American Civil Liberties Union (aclu.org). 14 J A NU A R Y 2010 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com Providing legal opinions is an everyday occurrence, but what part should ethics play in the form and function of such opinions? Writing in the Oct. 8, 2009 issue formal legal opinion, properly done, is the essence of lawyering. It sorts out the relevant facts. It of The New York Review of Books, David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University's law school in Washington, D.C., says of the torture memos that they "reveal a sustained effort by OLC lawyers to rationalize a predetermined and illegal result." Cole writes: "Law at its worst treats legal doctrine as infi- nitely manipulable, capable of being twisted cynically in whatever direc- tion serves the client's desires." The authors of the memos were not DARCY MUENCHRATH