Court Opinion

ID: 9640978
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 17:20:10.012526+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:34.366688
License: Public Domain

MICHAEL A. WOLFF, Judge,
dissenting.
“Hard cases make bad law” is a familiar adage that seems to fit this case. The adage appears in a dissent by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. “Great cases, like hard cases, make bad law,” Holmes said. “For great cases are called great, not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment. These immediate interests exercise a kind of hydraulic pressure which makes what previously was clear seem doubtful, and before which even well settled principles of law will bend.”1
I have long believed that disbarment is the penalty for stealing from clients. But this is a hard case because the respondent Mr. Belz, as the principal opinion ably notes, appears to have had a long and otherwise honorable career as lawyer and as a church and civic leader, as well as to have overcome, for the most part, a mental illness that he has endured through much of his life.
Moreover, when it comes to assessing punishments, I have learned over time that hard-and-fast rules often produce injustice and social dysfunction. Nevertheless, stealing is stealing. If there are certain immutable rules, then surely this is one: Lawyers may not steal from their clients. Not even borrowing without permission with the intention of repaying — it is still stealing. A license to practice law is not a license to steal. We should not give cynics, who may believe otherwise, any support for their wrong-headed view — regardless of mitigating circumstances. There *48are in fact no mitigating circumstances: no medical or psychiatric excuse mitigates this behavior. Lawyers must be held to this standard of honesty despite their individual circumstances.
Stealing from clients should result in disbarment. This is a well-settled principle that we should not bend.
I respectfully dissent.

. Northern Sec. Co. v. U.S., 193 U.S. 197, 400-401, 24 S.Ct. 436, 48 L.Ed. 679 (1904).