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4 Stan. L. Rev. 3 (1951-1952)
The Ethics of Advocacy

handle is hein.journals/stflr4 and id is 29 raw text is: The Ethics of Advocacy CHARLEs P. CURns* I want first of all to put advocacy in its proper setting. It is a special case of vicarious conduct. A lawyer devotes his life and career to acting for other people. So too does the priest, and in another way the banker. The banker handles other people's money. The priest handles other people's spiritual aspirations. A lawyer handles other people's troubles. But there is a difference. The loyalty of a priest or clergyman runs, not to the particular parishioner whose joys or troubles he is busy with, but to his church; and the banker looks to his bank. It is the church or the bank, not he, but he on its behalf, who serves the communicant or the borrower. Their loyalties run in a different direction than a lawyer's. So too when a lawyer works for the government. His loyalties hang on a superior peg, like the priest's or the clergyman's. For it is fiction to say that he only has the government for his client. The government is too big. It absorbs him. He is a part of it. Likewise with the general counsel for a corporation. His identi- fication with his client is all but complete. Taft in some lectures at the Albany Law School,1 referring to work in the legal department of a corporation, said, Such employment leads to a lawyer's be- coming nothing more than an officer of the corporation as closely identified with it as if he was the president, the secretary or the treasurer.' Indeed, he usually is a director or a vice-president. Not so the lawyer in private practice. His loyalty runs to his client. He has no other master. Not the court? you ask. Does not the court take the same position as the church or the bank? Is not the lawyer an officer of the court? Why doesn't the court have first claim on his loyalty? No, in a paradoxical way. The lawyer's official duty, required of him indeed by the court, is to devote him- self to the client. The court comes second by the court's, that is the law's, own command. Lord Brougham, in his defense of Queen Caroline, in her di- *A.B., Harvard University, 1914; LL.B., 1917; Member of the Massachusetts Bar. See also President's Page, page 1 supra. 1. The Hubbard Lectures in May 1914. 2. CHEATHAs, CAsEs AND MATEEIALS ON TE LFGAL PRopEssioN 60 (1938). 3

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