GOOD ADVICE FROM EUGENE VOLOKH: Good lawyers don’t deplore their judges and jurors — advice to the young and politically minded.

My advice: Stop deploring.

Hillary Clinton’s condemnation of half of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” was a famous wrong move on her part (as Romney’s 47 percent comment had been a wrong move on his). But it’s important to think about why it’s a bad approach: Why, even if some of your adversaries’ views really are deplorable, thinking this way isn’t useful.

If you’re trying to influence the public, think of yourself as a lawyer, and of voters as your judges and jurors. Except that there are no peremptory challenges or challenges for cause. You can’t strike people because they’re prejudiced, or because you think they are. You’re stuck with them, and they’ll be passing judgment on your client — on your ideas and ideals that you are arguing for. Now what are you going to do?

Good lawyers don’t deplore their judges and jurors. Partly that’s because they don’t want to alienate the people who will be passing judgment on them. Deploring obviously turns off the deplored.

But it’s also because deploring blinds the deplorer. If you focus on how evil some of your judges are, you won’t do a good job of figuring out how you can persuade them — how you can find common ground, how you can fit your requests into their worldview. Good lawyering, like good politics, in large measure relies on empathy: The ability (which starts the willingness) to put yourself into the judge’s and juror’s shoes, to identify the arguments against you that they see as most compelling and to figure out how you can make your arguments compelling to people like them — not to people like you, but to people like them, however benighted you might otherwise think they are.

That’s especially because giving in to the urge to deplore will systematically lead you to misjudge what really animates some of your judges and jurors. The most natural thing in the world is for us to assume the best motives on the part of our friends and to assume the worst motives on the part of our adversaries. Indeed, it’s natural because it’s often so emotionally rewarding.

Sometimes we’re right about the motives of some chunk of our adversaries. But often we’re wrong. Focusing on how deplorable some judges’ or jurors’ views are will often lead us to misunderstand what really drives them, and how we can use that to lead them to our way of thinking (or at least our way of voting).

Good advice, for lawyers, politicians, and everyone else.