Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 20.pdf/110

 AMERICAN CODE OF LEGAL ETHICS insist, "an attorney must decline in a civil cause to conduct a prosecution, when satisfied that the purpose is merely to harass or injure the opposite party, or to work oppression and wrong."1 It is the veriest sophistry to attempt the justifica tion which some do, that every man, be he in the right or in the wrong, has a right to be heard in court. The suitor in an unjust cause or the defender who sets up an unjust defense may have a legal right, but he certainly has no moral right, to be heard in court; and since a lawyer, as an officer of courts of justice, is bound to aid in secunng just decisions, he has no moral right to assist in securing unjust ones. Baron Bramwell once said, to be sure: "A man's rights are to be determined by the court; not by his attorney or counsel. It is for the want of remembering this that foolish people object to lawyers that they will advocate a case against their own opinions. A client is entitled to say to his counsel, ' I want your advocacy, not your judgment; I prefer that of the court.' " 2 And Lord Brougham in his famous speech in behalf of Queen Caroline also made what the Court of Appeals of New York called "the atrocious but memorable dec laration"* that "an advocate, by the sacred duty which he owes his client, knows, in the discharge of that office, but one person in the world, that client and none other." * But neither of these men was considering the case of a lawyer who was absolutely convinced that his client's cause was unjust. That either' of them would have advocated that a lawyer should knowingly aid a rascally client to perpetrate a swindle or carry through a blackmailing lawsuit or in any other way make dis1 Sec. 15, Report of August, 1907, p. 20. What is here said of a plaintiff's attorney applies equally to a defendant's. 1 Johnson v. Emerson, L. R. 6. ex. 367. i*7, i33' lend
 * Turnpike Road Co. v. Loomis, 32 N. Y.

honesty succeed is unthinkable.1 As Chief Justice Cockburn once remarked: "My noble and learned friend, Lord Brougham, said that an advocate should be fearless in carrying out the interests of his client; but I couple that with this qualification and this restriction, that the arms which he wields are to be the arms of the warrior and not of the assassin. It is his duty to accomplish the interests of his client per fas and not per nefas."* Or as Judge McCrary is reported still more tersely to have put it: "There is, there must be, a limit beyond which the advocate cannot go. A lawyer should never be the tool of an unscrupulous client. If he is asked to aid a rascal in an effort to oppress and wrong another, he must refuse. No fee should be suffi cient to hire him for such work." Still another way of stating the matter is found in Hoffman's i4th resolution in regard to professional deportment, where he says: "My client's conscience and my own are distinct entities; and though my vocation may sometimes justify my maintaining as facts or principles, in doubtful cases, what may be neither one nor the other, I shall ever claim the privilege of solely judging to what extent to go. In civil cases, if I am satisfied from the evidence that the fact is against my client, he must excuse me if I do not see as he does, and do not press it; and should the principle also be wholly at variance with sound law, it would be dishonorable folly in me to en deavor to incorporate it into the jurispru dence of the country, when, if successful, it would be a gangrene that might bring death to my cause of the succeeding day." ' A lawyer may take up a case which he believes in and then at some subsequent stage discover its injustice. The only general rule that can be laid down even there is that he should abandon it, if there 1 "Such a proposition as that of Lord Broug ham shocks the moral sense." Turnpike Road Co. v. Loomis, 32 N. Y. 127, 133. 1 Quoted in 15 Law Quarterly Review, 270-1. 1 Quoted in Report of August. 1907, p. 46.