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Two lawyers have captured my attention this week. Their situations could hardly be more different. In China, Gao Zhisheng, raised in poverty and self-taught in the law, left prison after serving a three-year sentence, knowing that he could well face more of the treatment which has driven his wife and children out of the country. Gareth Peirce (Cheltenham Ladies College, Oxford and the LSE), celebrated as one of the most distinguished solicitors of her generation, was profiled in A Law Unto Themselves, the Radio 4 series on ‘lawyers and judges who stand out from the legal crowd.’ Both are driven by a common passion - to speak for those who can’t speak for themselves, to pursue justice for people overwhelmed by what can sometimes seem like the whole weight of the state (and often popular opinion as well). They take on apparently hopeless cases. Gao Zhisheng, once named among China’s top ten lawyers, built a reputation helping poor people fight powerful officials in cases of medical malpractice, land redistribution, employment disputes and enforced sterilisation. He defended journalists, dissident Christian believers, and members of the fiercely persecuted Falun Gong movement. Gareth Peirce has spent forty years in the service of people who were widely presented as public enemies, from the days of Irish Republican bombings with the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six to various detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The fact that she has helped to get a string of convictions overturned can only have strengthened her commitment: the outcasts must be represented, she insists, not least because, ‘the minority has to be protected from what the majority thinks…’ Inevitably some of the mud thrown at her clients can stick to her, even when they’ve been shown to be innocent. It’s part of the price she’s been willing to pay, just as Gao Zhisheng has kept going despite prison, the fear of torture and long periods when he’s disappeared, and his family have had no idea whether he was alive or dead. He takes such defence of the defenceless as part of his calling as a Christian believer. He’s one with others of all faiths and none who find themselves drawn to those treated as pariahs. They share the indignation of the Hebrew prophet Amos, who refused to stay silent in face of evident abuse of the legal process. To those who trampled on basic rights, he declared sternly: ‘You people hate anyone who challenges injustice and speaks the whole truth in court... And so keeping quiet in such evil times is the clever thing to do!’ I’m grateful to be reminded of two clever lawyers who simply refuse to do the clever thing…and all those like them.