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Benjamin Cardozo, a great justice of the US Supreme Court, averred that for lawyers, “membership of the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions. A fair private and professional character is one of them”.This was his answer in the case of a crooked lawyer named Jacob Rouss who, after turning State’s witness and receiving immunity from prosecution for his part in a bid to obstruct justice over a bribery scheme, appealed against his later disbarment.Cardozo, then a New York Appeals Court judge in 1917, further said: “Compliance with that condition is essential at the moment of admission; but it is equally essential afterwards. Whenever the condition is broken; the privilege is lost.”Cardozo reached back in time and beyond the sea for support in his view that disbarment was not retribution. He went back to Lord Mansfield, the English jurist who famously ruled that slavery was illegal in England of 1772, a full six decades before Emancipation.“The question is,” said Mansfi