Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine, and I am here today with Stephen Bright.

He is a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School.

He was also the director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta for many years from 1982 to 2005,

and it's president and senior council until 2016, and is

presently teaching at Georgetown, and is a personal friend of mine who has the distinction of

being the professor in law school who convinced me that being a lawyer didn't necessarily have to be a huge waste of time

and could possibly actually accomplish some good for some people some of the time.

So welcome Professor Bright.

Well, thank you. It's great to talk to you, Nathan.

I want to talk to you today about the right to counsel,

which is something that you've written extensively on and has been at the core of a lot of your work. And I want to first zero in on why,

in particular, of all the various places where the criminal punishment system fails people,

the right to a decent lawyer is something that you

have tried to draw attention over and over to as a really important point at which the system

can succeed or fail. As we know, in 1963, the United States Supreme Court guaranteed everyone

the right to counsel criminal cases in

Gideon, but there's a quote from the first article you wrote in the Yale Law Journal in

1994 about this, Counsel for the Poor, the death sentence, not for the worst crime, but for

the worst lawyer. There's a quote that was really struck with me from the at the time the vice president

of the Georgia Trial Lawyers Association who said the test used it Georgia to determine whether

a defendant has received an adequate lawyer is the mirror test. You put a mirror under the court

appointed lawyer's nose and if the mirror clouds up, that's adequate counsel. Essentially,

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