4.2.12 WC: 191694 be a leader of the criminal defense bar and to have successfully defended many accused criminals, some innocent, some guilty. There are, however, certain categories of clients I will almost never accept. These include professional criminals who are in the business of doing illegal things and will almost certainly go back to that business if I get them off: drug dealers, Mafioso, terrorists, gang leaders. These professional criminals are entitled to counsel, but I do not want to become a “consiglieri” to a crime family (remember Tom Hagen in the Godfather) or an advisor to those who are in the business of committing crimes. I also do not generally represent fugitives from justice while they are still “on the lam.” A lawyer’s job does not include helping a client illegally evade or escape from justice. I try to take interesting cases that will have an impact on law, cases in which an injustice has been done or seems likely to be done, and cases involving my personal areas of expertise (science, constitutional law, psychology). I take about half of my cases on a pro bono basis and the other half on a fee basis. I use the fees to support the expenses of my pro bono cases. Among the most interesting cases I declined have been accusations of murder committed outside the United States and involving foreign leaders. As an American lawyer, I have less of an obligation to take foreign cases than I do to take American ones. Perhaps the most difficult case for me to have turned down involved the Israeli student, Igal Amir, who was accused of assassinating the late Yitchaz Rabin, the then Prime Minister of Israel. Several days after the crime that rocked the world, the family of the man accused of committing it asked me to become his lawyer. I met with them and they told me that he had in fact pulled the trigger, but that he was legally innocent, because the killing was justified under the Jewish law of “rodef’—a concept akin to preventive or anticipatory self-