If You Can't Trust Your Lawyer....?

Abstract

One problem with lawyers lying is that deceit is facially repugnant to a system that aspires to find the truth in human conflict and intercourse. The lawyer's role, both as an advocate and as an officer of the courts, is critical to achieving that mission and enhancing public confidence in the administration of justice and the integrity of the process of law. How, then, can lawyers lie, or engage in deceit? Very simply, they should not; but obviously more than a few lawyers do it. One reason, perhaps, lies in the reality that our justice system is a forum politic that accommodates, like the diverse society it serves, ambiguity, exaggeration, cleverness, and, on occasion, something less than the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This tolerance to deception is encouraged by the profession's institutional civility. Seldom is a fig called a fig, or a shyster a shyster. No, our euphemisms are wonderfully polite: frivolous conduct, or a lack of candor; or law-office failure; or, heaven forbid, a peculation, a defalcation, or a negative balance in a law firms's trust account.