Within Each Lawyer's Conscience a Touchstone: Law, Morality, and Attorney Civil Disobedience

Abstract

Lawyers, like all citizens, inevitably face conflicts between their responsibility to the law and their moral obligations. Attorneys, however, have a unique range of options for resolving such conflicts. They not only have power and privilege in the legal system that other citizens lack, but they also assume a heightened duty to that system and to the law. As the Model Code of Professional Responsibility states, “[t]o lawyers especially, respect for the law should be more than a platitude.” Civil disobedience has become an accepted method for citizens to resist the authority of the state on moral grounds. By committing civil disobedience and willingly accepting judicial punishment, one can protest the moral content of a law while still respecting the legal duty it imposes. This Comment addresses whether the current rules of professional ethics leave the option of civil disobedience available to attorneys, and asks under what circumstances attorneys may be justified in exercising that option.