Should Lawyers Be Loyal To Clients, the Law, or Both?

Abstract

Loyalty is a central ideal in both legal ethics and fiduciary law, but recent theoretical approaches to legal ethics also emphasize the connection between the legal profession and the rule of law or democratic self-government. In order for lawyers to perform the role of securing relationships of mutual respect among citizens of a political community, the requirement of single-minded, partisan loyalty to clients may need to be relaxed. Fidelity to law may be in tension with fidelity to clients. This paper considers Daniel Markovits’s strong conception of loyalty and his argument that it follows from necessary conditions for democratic legitimacy. Markovits contends that partisan advocacy is necessary to transform the attitudes of citizens in a way that causes them to internalize the community’s scheme of legal rights and duties as the product of collective authorship by all affected citizens. In that sense, citizens can be said to internalize the requirements of the community’s law. The paper then defends a more modest internalist approach to legal legitimacy and authority, in which giving a legal justification for some action necessarily means committing oneself to a practical stance toward the law that assumes one’s membership in a political community and accepts the community’s laws as reasons for action.