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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
It is not the lawyer's responsibility to believe or not to believe – the lawyer is a technician … Law is an adversarial profession. The other side is out to get your client. Your job is to protect your client and the nonsense they hand out in these ethics courses today – if the young people listen to this kind of nonsense, there isn't going to be such a thing as an intelligent defense in a civil or criminal case.
A conscience … put out to lease is not conscience but the evasion of it, except for that specious semblance of conscience which may be discerned in one's blind obedience to the authority that happens to be in command.
Introduction
Holding forth at table in 1831, Samuel Taylor Coleridge turned to the behavior of lawyers. “There is undoubtedly a limit to the exertions of an advocate for his client,” he said, for “the advocate has no right, nor is it his duty, to do that for his client which his client in foro conscientiae has no right to do for himself.” Thirteen years later, William Whewell elaborated the same point:
Every man is, in an unofficial sense, by being a moral agent, a Judge of right and wrong, and an Advocate of what is right … This general character of a moral agent, he cannot put off, by putting on any professional character … If he mixes up his character as an Advocate, with his character as a Moral Agent … he acts immorally. He makes the Moral Rule subordinate to the Professional Rule. He sells to his Client, not only his skill and learning, but himself. He makes it the Supreme Object of his life to be, not a good man, but a successful Lawyer.
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