LAWYERS’ MORALS.

Western Star, Issue 932, 21 March 1885, Page 1 (Supplement)

LAWYERS’ MORALS.

A lawyer ought to be a be a gentleman. His function as an attorney gives him no dispensation to disregard the ordinary rules of good manners, and the ordinary principles of decency and honour. He has no right to slander his neighbour, even if his neighbour be the defendant in a cause in which he, appears for the plaintiff. He has no right to bully or brow-beat a witness in cross-examina-tion, or artfully to entrap that witness into giving false testimony. Whatever the privilege of the Court may be, the lawyer who is guilty of such practices in Court is no gentleman out of Court. A lawyer ought not to lie. He may defend a criminal whom he knows to be guilty, but he may not say to the jury that he believes this criminal to be innocent. He may not in any way intentionally convey to the jury the impression that he believes the man to be innocent. He may not in his plea pervert or distort the evidence so as to weaken the force or conceal the meaning of it. He is a sworn officer of the Court, and his oath should bind him to the strictest veracity. It would be Quixotic to expect him to assist his adversary, but his obligation to speak the truth outranks every obligation that he owes to bis client. It is notorious that some lawyers who think it scandalous to tell a lie out of Court, lie shamelessly in Court in behalf of their clients, and seem to think it part of their professional duty. That bar of justice before which, by their professional obligations, they are bound to the most stringent truthfulness, is the very place where they seem to consider themselves absolved from the common law of veracity. So long as the legal mind is infected with this deadly heresy, we need not wonder that our Courts of justice often becomes the instruments of unrighteousness. —Century Magazine.