No one, including Salbiah Ahmad ('Do lawyers serve justice?' Sept 7) who herself is a lawyer, loves a lawyer. Before bashing the lawyers for serving commercial interests of apparatuses of capital and vested interests, having scant interest in development activism within a broader multi-disciplinary framework, it must be recollected in favour of lawyers the following practical realities.

Firstly, lawyers are just as much concerned with the financial well and respectability of themselves and their families as others of different professions and walks of life. No moral vision or action higher than the rest of common humanity ought reasonably be expected from lawyers though we expect them to adhere at least to the ethics of their profession.

In these premises, what is wrong if some lawyers do financially well by serving rich capitalist clients? I am sure there are also other lawyers who do not mind fighting for the small non-paying clients for reasons of principle or interest in advancing their pet cause. It cannot be discounted that these lawyers may also have rich capitalist parents and are set up financially for life so that their lawyering is not affected by monetary considerations.

Their knowledge of the law that places them in a comparatively better vantage point to effect change for social justice can be put to use, for those so inclined, when they serve, as many presently do, in various NGOs and political organisations and engage in public discourses through academic or other public forums in which they could present erudite papers on the subject matter of their concern. Depending on individual interests, they can champion all kinds of causes from human to animal rights, environment to consumer rights.

Whilst they are plying the trade of law practice, lawyers are, however, entirely justified to advise according to the laws given as they are, and not what they think the laws ought to be.

For those who are interested in changing the political fabric and levelling the playing field between rich and poor, the oppressor and the exploited, the informed and the ignorant, surely they are not barred by their legal training - indeed they are much assisted by it - to participate in the political process by becoming politicians, activists or whatever. Such extra-curricular interests may be pursued but separately, and as a thing apart from the legal practice that operates under different norms and rules.

Such "development activism" is not the prerogative of lawyers. So can the architect or engineer who has interest in social engineering or a doctor in the health of the political body politic, so to speak.

Because laws govern intimately so many aspects of our lives, we may hate the lawyers but need them. This is because lawyers by advice help us secure our rights within parameters and interpretation of the laws vis--vis others who at the opposite side also desire to secure their own interest and assert their rights against us.

If lawyers are given to being cantankerous, and adversarial and combative, and sometimes 'snakey', it is because they act for and represent us in our own petty or principled fights and causes, and in the process of fighting against the other side, all our innate propensities for greed, vindictiveness, victory, financial gain are brought out to the open.

So the next time before you bash lawyers, it will do well to remember that they are a mere mirror reflection of some of the things that we dislike most in ourselves, such dislike being projected unto our legal representatives to free us from shame guilt and stress.

Any society will get the lawyers - as politicians - it deserves. The burden of improving the quality of life and integrity of the nation is shared by everyone else in it and should not be onerously placed on the shoulders of lawyers alone. Give the lawyers a break!