Do your clients want to be represented by lawyers who support the designated terrorist organization Hamas? Do they want lawyers who approve of rapes and kidnappings of Israeli Jews? Do they want lawyers who have harassed and threatened Jews? Do your clients have a right to know whether such bigots work for your law firm so they can decide for themselves whether they want to be represented by them?

Some law firms have withdrawn offers from law students who blamed the Hamas mass murders on Israel alone. Indeed, a consortium of law firms has sent a letter to the deans of U.S. law schools saying that “as employers who recruit from each of your law schools, we look to you to ensure your students [that our firms] have zero tolerance policies for any form of discrimination or harassment, much less the kind that has been taking place on some law school campuses.” Others law firms have remained silent.

As a teacher of legal ethics, I believe that law firms that hire such supporters of Hamas barbarism have an ethical obligation to disclose the decision they have made to their clients, and to not assign such lawyers to any client without getting their informed consent. If the students or lawyers recant their earlier support, as some appear to have done, that fact, too, should be disclosed, but the clients should be informed that they originally supported the Hamas barbarities. It is up to the client not the law firm, to decide what weight, if any, not give to any alleged recantation.

Consider the case of Ibrahim Bharmal, a law review student at Harvard Law School, where I taught students like him for 50 years. Numerous sources have identified him from a video as one of the students who harassed a Jewish student, surrounding him, shouting at him and preventing him from leaving a situation that he believed was threatening to him physically.

Some reports say the harassers were “grabbing and shoving him to the ground,” and that Bharmal was among the leaders of the group. Bharmal was also reportedly the co-president of the South Asian Law Student Association (SALSA), which joined a public statement released the day after the Hamas attack, blaming all these atrocities entirely on Israel. This statement was issued before Israel counter attacked Hamas in Gaza.

After receiving much criticism, SALSA issued another statement seeking to retract the first one. In light of his status as a law review editor, it is highly likely that Bharmal has received numerous job offers, almost certainly from employers who were unaware of his actions. Now that they have been made public by his participation in the videotaped harassment and the published original petitions, as well as the retraction, what should employers who made job offers do?

They certainly should provide him with the opportunity to explain his specific roles in the harassment, original petition, and retraction. But whatever a given law firm decides, it would be ethically obliged to notify potential clients of all the facts regarding the Hamas supporting lawyer assigned to represent a client.

The same is true of any lawyer who is an active member of the National Lawyers Guild, a hard- left organization that supported the Hamas atrocities, declaring them to be appropriate “military” responses to Israel’s occupation. So did The Bronx Defenders’ union, which represents indigent clients. If a lawyer belongs to the National Lawyers Guild, The Bronx Defenders, or other legal organizations that support Hamas, clients should be entitled to ask them whether they support the barbaric acts committed by that terror group on Oct. 7.

Some will probably say they were unaware that their organization supported the Hamas atrocities. Others may say they support Hamas—despite its designation as a terror group to whom it is criminal to provide material support—but not these specific acts. While still others will try to justify the atrocities as appropriate military responses to an occupation.

Clients have the right to know which of these (or other) positions a lawyer selected to represent them espouses. Many clients will not want to be represented by a lawyer who believes that the rapes and beheadings of civilians, including children, are appropriate military actions. Others may. In any event, clients are entitled to have the information to help make the decision.

It is important to understand that holding individual lawyers accountable for public actions and petitions is not “doxxing,” as some have claimed. The marketplace of ideas, protected by the First Amendment, requires transparency, which generally includes knowing the identity of those who participate in that marketplace. Doxxing involves disclosing information that was intended to remain private, such as sexual preferences, home addresses, as well as the identity and location of family members. Doxxing does not involve disclosing merely the names of individuals who participated in harassment or who supported publicly issued statements.

Students and lawyers have a First Amendment right to espouse outrageous and immoral views, without fear of punishment by the government. But private clients also have a right to evaluate their potential lawyers on the basis of how they exercise that right.

Alan M. Dershowitz is a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School