The rant is courtesy of William Otis, in "A tale of truth in modern America," found in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Winter 2003, pp. 235-37.
Some might think it odd to believe that a relationship of authentic trust can be built on a shared, if unspoken, understanding that authentic trust is impossible. And, of course, a good deal of the time there simply is no trust. Clients intuitively understand that a person who will dissemble for them might sooner or later dissemble to them. Readiness to cut a corner here and another there is not a character trait easily confined. The willingness to deceive, the temptation to call deceit by a more polite name, and the consequent ever-expanding seepage of dishonesty in the way we deal with one another, all have their own cancerous dynamic in the soul of a human being, of a profession, and of a nation. It is thus not mere circumspection that accounts for the fact that clients so often lie to their lawyers. On the contrary, clients wisely view lawyers with the suspicion we have earned by our penchant for excusing everything from willful blindness to soft-core perjury.
We feel the need to ponder the question before us today because we have long since abjured the simple man's answer to the question of what should be a lawyer's responsibility to the truth. The simple man's answer is, "Tell it." But that won't do for the more sophisticated among us, those who see, or say they see, the nuances and complexities of the world in general and the practice of law in particular. Ours are the precincts of more refined thinking. Only I suggest it is not refinement; it is equivocation impersonating refinement-or at least so I used to think. Increasingly, I think it's just dishonesty impersonating equivocation.
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