Alienation, Violence, and the Law

-- By DanielMargolskee - 28 May 2009

A lawyer is a person who does things using words. But what the lawyers we’ve encountered actually end up doing with those words is frequently violent--violent either to others, or to themselves, or to both.

The seeds of conflict are embedded in the structure of the relationship between lawyer and client: the lawyer is ethically required to treat his client’s interests as largely identical to his own, but the client’s interests often aren’t identical to the lawyer’s. As Wylie says in “Something Split,” a lawyer “has to be capable of deep moral compromise. You have to do things, be a part of things, you don’t want to be a part of” (p. 41).

Is it possible to have a career as a practicing lawyer, without either compromising one’s own integrity or failing to pursue the client’s interests vigorously?

One More Case Study

After 26 years in prison for a murder he hadn’t committed, Alton Logan was exonerated in May 2008. The actual killer, Andrew Wilson, had confessed the crime many years earlier to his two court-appointed attorneys, Dale Coventry and Jamie Kunz. Since the lawyers were bound by attorney-client privilege, they could only come forward after Wilson died last year.

As a matter of professional ethics, it is clear that Coventry and Kunz were prohibited from disclosing what Wilson had told them. But it is equally clear that Coventry and Kunz’s silence would effectively condemn an innocent man to prison until Wilson’s death. Under such circumstances, keeping Wilson’s confidence might be fairly described as doing considerable violence to Logan. Breaching the confidence, however, might inflict a different sort of violence: it could “put Logan’s head in the noose,” and would open Coventry and Kunz up to sanctions and the possibility of disbarment.

Coventry and Kunz were faced with the irreconcilable dilemma of either allowing a serious injustice to happen, or to prevent it by betraying their client, potentially losing their license in the process.

In “Something Split,” Wylie and the unnamed lawyer’s practice “ruin[s] thousands of lives”--but this is only apparent when they take a moment to stop and “think it through” (41), and both were paid handsomely to try to ignore those ruined lives. In contrast, Coventry and Kunz were confronted full in the face with the life that would be ruined by the decision, renewed every day, to preserve their client’s confidentiality.

The decision not to reveal the secret was clearly the professionally ethical decision--and under some balance-of-harms analyses, it is arguably even the moral decision. But it is also clear that Coventry and Kunz desperately wanted to reveal their client’s secret. They begged him to release them from their duty, and prepared an affidavit dated years ago, in case they were later permitted to reveal the information.

In reading Coventry and Kunz’s story, I wonder whether they felt the same “split” that Wylie’s partner felt, at some point in the 26 years they kept this horrible secret; whether they experienced the same “snap” the unnamed partner felt when living the lawyer’s compartmentalized double-life all of the sudden became unbearable (p. 41). If so, I wonder how that snap expressed itself. Was it through violence-against-self--in the form of depression and drinking? Or through violence-against-others--lashing out against friends and loved ones or, as Cerriere and Singleton did, at vulnerable strangers like the mop boy and the shoe salesman?

The Man Who Knows What He Wants

In this semester’s readings, we’ve encountered only one person who was wholly unwilling to compromise himself: Bartleby. (Perhaps tellingly, Bartleby was also not a lawyer.)

Bartleby was unwilling to balance harms or choose lesser evils. Bartleby also refused the attempts by the narrator to frame his choices by imposing an “assumption” on Bartleby (p. 20). Instead, Bartleby knew exactly what it was that he wanted, and once he got it, he refused to relinquish it, or to accept the terms the narrator tried to impose on him. Indeed, his refusal to even pretend to engage with the narrator or to be “reasonable” leads the narrator to feel “disarmed” and “unmanned” (14).

His calm persistence leads the narrator to feel a murderous rage, though the narrator is somewhat queasy about following through (23). Bartleby’s story does end with violence, however, when subsequent occupants of No. -- Wall Street use the brute force of the State to have Bartleby thrown in prison.

But even though the story ends with violence, the violence is not Bartleby’s. Though Bartleby is a tragic figure, he is never forced to compromise with himself or with others.

Lawyering Without Alienation

The most obvious solution, if we want to avoid compromising ourselves in our future careers, is to pick our clients carefully--to only represent those clients who we actually want to win, whose interests actually align with ours. This is a luxury most lawyers don't have. Certainly the corporate and transactional lawyers we read about don't have that luxury, but neither do public defenders like Coventry and Kunz, or other criminal defense attorneys like Robinson.