There is a good point to be found in former public defender, Gabriel Urza’s, op-ed. Unfortunately, it’s not the point he (I think, but can’t really be sure) tries to make.

When I landed a job as a public defender in my hometown, Reno, Nev., fresh out of law school in 2004, I had no practical experience with the criminal justice system. I hadn’t volunteered with a legal aid organization, hadn’t even been on the mock trial team in school. I had never sat at a counsel table.

So when Sean, an attorney in the office who had been a public defender for a decade, took it upon himself to show me the ropes, I was all too eager to listen. He showed me how to get into the jail to visit my clients, when to fill out a D.U.I. waiver or file a motion to dismiss, how to prepare for evidentiary hearings and how to deal with belligerent clients and prosecutors.

Perhaps most important, he taught me how to fly fish.

Fly fishing as metaphor is a valuable lesson for criminal defense lawyers. But as an actual thing to do, not so much.

Fly fishing, I quickly came to realize, offered membership into a certain group of attorneys in the legal community in Reno, men whose friendship, or at least fraternity, happened to be professionally useful — sometimes in ways that made me feel uneasy.

I’ve been to Reno. It’s a dump. But it’s likely a dump in need of a lot of public defenders and prosecutors, and apparently fly fishing is a big thing out there. If you’re a fly fisherman in Manhattan, you will not find a fraternity with which to bond. Not in the courthouse. Not anywhere. We don’t fly fish much.

In retrospect, I understand the problems of privilege that came with this informal brotherhood — just pick up an issue of American Angler, tell me how many women or minorities you come across. A female defense attorney I worked with would often send me to negotiate with the prosecutors on behalf of our team. “Go talk dude to them,” she’d say.

The ability to get along with the other guys, to be able to talk like human beings rather than adversaries, is a valuable tool. But when Urza relates this tool to the “privilege” as proven by the color of the people in the pictures of American Angler, he either loses his point or misses it entirely.

It’s not about fly fishing. It’s not about white people fly fishing. It’s not about the “privilege” of who fishes with flies. Fuck the flies. Fuck the fishing. It’s got nothing to do with American Angler.

The notion that a personal rapport between prosecutors and defense attorneys can affect the outcome of a client’s case — might in fact shape the rest of his life — is an uncomfortable one. It is, however, a reality.

Why is this uncomfortable? It’s certainly a reality, but it’s a reality in every endeavor. There’s nothing uncomfortable about being able to talk to people, even people who sit at the other table. This is how things get accomplished, moving beyond the simplistic “we’re adversaries, therefore I hate you and you suck,” to having a useful discussion.

And indeed, that the mention of “privilege” or discomfort even arises is inexplicable. If you can’t bond over fly fishing, bond over something else. Bond over wrist watches, or rap music, or whatever floats your boat. We’re all people, and we all have interests beyond the parochial sides of the courtroom.

Oh wait. I just realized the problem Urza raises.

And it can be argued that a defense attorney is ethically obligated to nurture good relationships with prosecutors, as unpleasant as it can feel to do so. If two opposing attorneys get along, the negotiations tend to go better for the defendant. In a weak case, an afternoon fishing trip might be the difference between a conviction and a dismissal, between a misdemeanor and a felony, between a year of probation and a year of prison.

That’s all you have. You don’t engage with real people in the ordinary course of life anymore. You have one outside interest, at the suggestion of your mentor, and there is nothing else to talk about, to bond over. It really is fly fishing or nothing.

Urza doesn’t say that he’s so one-dimensional, so limited, that it’s just fly fishing. But then, if this ethical obligation exists, and the only thing he can offer is fly fishing, and it reflects an uncomfortable resort to privilege such that it precludes blacks or women, what other takeaway can there be?

Of course criminal defense lawyers need to be able to talk to prosecutors. What blithering idiot would think otherwise? Of course we need to be able to create a relationship, both to serve our clients’ best interests and because we’re people who exist beyond the bubble of Facebook where we “like” other people’s rants about privilege.

Maybe this op-ed has a secret coded message, that it’s not about fly fishing per se as would appear to an old lawyer, or maybe the interjection of the word privilege that has no apparent connection to anything meaningful is just some homage to a demographic Urza hopes to court so he can sell his book. Beats me.

I find so much of what people write these days to defy comprehension.  Words that strike me as disturbing are taken for granted by people reared on such rhetoric, and find them completely acceptable despite the fact that they mean nothing.

But no, criminal defense lawyers do not have an ethical obligation to go fly fishing. They would be wise, however, to have the capacity and willingness to talk to prosecutors like people, because they are and we are and people should be able to talk. Yes, it can help the client. No, that’s not the only reason we should all be capable of talking to people who do not live completely within our safe space of total agreement.

There’s a pretty good chance that whatever your hobby, the other guy might have a different hobby. Maybe there will be some aspect of privilege to their hobby or yours. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter. We’re all human beings. Have we lost the capacity to talk to each other if we don’t fly fish? Are we no longer able to just talk to each other like regular people?