Daily Inspiration Quote by Ramsey Clark

The line lands like a procedural footnote, then quietly detonates. Ramsey Clark isn’t pleading for the comfort of attorneys; he’s drawing a bright, constitutional boundary around a system that tends to treat “security” as something the state provides to itself. By making lawyers the first concern, he reverses the usual moral hierarchy of public sympathy. Victims and defendants get the headlines. Lawyers are assumed to be insulated functionaries. Clark insists they’re frontline infrastructure.

The specificity matters: “security of the lawyers” is a proxy for whether the courtroom is still a courtroom or has become a theater of intimidation. If counsel can’t meet clients, investigate, or argue without fear, the adversarial system collapses into paperwork rubber-stamping power. That’s why he pairs “fair trial” with the harsher “if trial at all” - an escalation that signals how quickly due process can degrade from imperfect to illusory.

Clark’s subtext is also a warning about the optics of justice. A state can claim legality while tolerating conditions that make effective defense impossible, then point to the “trial” as proof of legitimacy. “Not been adequately attended to” reads like bureaucratic understatement, but it’s a prosecutorial accusation aimed at whoever controls the venue: you’ve failed the minimum requirements of rule-of-law governance.

Coming from a former U.S. attorney general turned civil-liberties critic, the context is the larger post-1960s/1970s struggle over political trials, unpopular defendants, and the creeping idea that safety concerns justify procedural shortcuts. Clark is staking out a non-negotiable: security isn’t a pretext to tighten the state’s fist; it’s the condition that keeps the state from becoming the only voice in the room.