Engineers can do nothing without clients. Therefore, all structural
failures are the result of the folks that hired the engineers to design
the structure, right?

No - neither of those are reasonable analogies.

They are identical analogies. Your assertion was simply ludicrous.

No, they're not. A more fitting analogy, would be to a gun. As we have
all heard many times, "guns don't kill people, people kill people."
Regardless of whether you're a fan of that statement, I think the
logic matches well with lawyers and their clients -- to a degree.

To make your engineering analogy work, a better story would be the
client who specifically asked an engineer to design the building so
cheaply that it would start to fall to pieces shortly after his client
had sold it. [ As an aside, most engineers are members of associations
like IEEE or ASME that do have ethics codes that would prohibit
this. ]

Most lawyerly behavior is not really immoral so much as it is amoral.
They do their job, which is very clearly defined as serving their
clients. It's an issue that has been discussed at length by attorneys
over the ages, but in the US system, courts are adversarial: the
lawyer's job is zealously represent his client. He has no
responsibility to "truth" or "social benefit," etc. (I understand that
European courts are more fact-finding and solution-seeking than
American. Typically, European judges, for example, take a more
proactive stance in managing cases than in the US, where the judge
just plays referee.)

Now, lawyers, unlike guns are people, so should have some personal
sense of right and wrong, but they also have a responsibility to do
their jobs well. It puts them in a bit of a gray area.

I agree with most here that the lawsuits on aircraft companies for
crashes that are not their fault are deeply, deeply, problematic, I
don't think the solution is killing the lawyers or making them somehow
more "moral." (And of course, there's the little question of who's
morality are we talking about?)

The problem is the clients, their incentives, and *their* sense of
reponsibility and fairness.

-- dave j
-- not a lawyer, but an engineer