Lying by Sissela Bok

Author:Sissela Bok [Bok, Sissela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78911-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-27T04:00:00+00:00

Fidelity to Clients

The relationship between a lawyer and his client is one of the intimate relations. You would lie for your wife. You would lie for your child. There are others with whom you are intimate enough, close enough, to lie for them when you would not lie for yourself. At what point do you stop lying for them? I don’t know and you are not sure.

This statement by Charles Curtis, a well-known Boston lawyer, has stirred up much discussion and some censure.12 Are there persons for whom one would lie when one would not lie for oneself? And why should there be such a difference? The same questions have arisen for clergymen and physicians who protect the secrets of their parishioners or patients. At stake here is not the protection of colleagues; it is the defense, thought more legitimate, of information given by clients to professionals in strictest confidence.

Most would agree with Curtis that the relationship between professional and client, like that between husband and wife, requires that certain secrets be protected. But few have come out in public to stretch that privilege so far as to include lying. Curtis himself drew the line at lying in court. More recently, however, Monroe Freedman, Dean of Hofstra Law School and author of a well-known book on legal ethics, has advocated some forms of deception even in the courtroom:

… the criminal defense attorney, however unwillingly in terms of personal morality, has a professional responsibility as an advocate in an adversary system to examine the perjurious client in the ordinary way and to argue to the jury, as evidence in the case, the testimony presented by the defendant.13

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