Lawyers at top law firms in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles said they fret constantly about saying the wrong thing—or taking on the wrong client.

“It’s much worse than McCarthyism,” Alan Dershowitz, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law, told me. “McCarthyism was a reflection of dying, old views. They were not the future. But the people today who are imposing litmus tests for who they represent—they are the future.”

When Dershowitz was accused, in 2014, of sexual relations with an underage girl at Jeffrey Epstein’s various residences, he said he had trouble finding representation. (A federal judge eventually struck the allegations from the record.)

Law firms have been known to avoid unpopular clients—Big Tobacco, for example—but the scope and frequency of these evasions have increased, dozens of lawyers interviewed for this story agreed. That’s partly because young lawyers, like the one who accosted David Boies, see representing someone as tantamount to endorsing them.

​​“It used to be that most lawyers could work for Catholic hospital system even if they were pro-choice,” a recently retired lawyer told me. “But now people just say, ‘I oppose this client, so I can’t work for them.’” (The lawyer had planned to stay at his law firm—one of the largest in the US—for a long time. He told me he retired in 2020 after the firm’s culture became “simply unbearable,” with younger associates excoriating him for being “old and white, and part of the reason we have systemic racism in America.”)