[textbook]Traversing the Ethical Minefield Problems, Law, and Professional Responsibility by Susan R. Martyn (z-lib.org)(1) (1)

interests should prevail) and partisan (to promote those interests). The lawyer should not be
held accountable for the client’s goals or conduct. Amoral advocacy becomes the guiding
norm of the adversary ethic. 4
Commentators have characterized this view in a number of colorful ways. 5 A lawyer
who adopts some form of this adversarial ethic has been labeled “client-centered,” but also
has been called an “amoral instrument,” “hired gun,” “plumber,” “puppet,” or “prostitute.”
This lawyer strongly advocates client interests but in doing so can overidentify with clients
and lose the independent judgment necessary to provide proper legal advice.
Instrumental lawyers tend to focus on providing adversarial advocacy in individual
client representations. 6 Once they agree to take on a client, these lawyers rightly recognize
the importance of fiduciary duties to promote client loyalty. 7 But their preference for client
autonomy might tempt them to suppress their own moral judgment and cede all authority
to the client in the process. Single-minded loyalty to a client then can become transformed
into a narrow-minded, unquestioning devotion to that client’s will. The client’s value
system controls the representation, and the lawyer escapes any moral accountability for
either the outcome or the means employed.
Lawyers who prefer an instrumental view of their role see only one limit to client
advocacy: the bounds of the law and the legal system itself. Yet these legal bounds can
become unclear to an instrumental lawyer because law itself might be viewed as a malleable
means to pursue the client’s desires. If the legal system exists to promote individual welfare,
then law can be envisioned primarily as a process that provides clients with a means to
challenge or take advantage of the existing order.
Instrumental lawyers view the social fabric as relatively strong, capable of withstanding
most challenges to the existing limits or bounds of the law or other majoritarian interests.
At the same time, however, focusing primarily or exclusively on client interests might cause
them to lose opportunities to explain a legal or moral boundary to clients or to discover a
client’s true intention. Worse, these lawyers can become blind to a clear legal limit that
could subject the client and the lawyer to severe sanctions. The result could be serious harm
to others as well as to the client and the lawyer.
Assuming such role-differentiated behavior also can transform a lawyer’s entire
personality. Lawyers who live an amoral professional life might be tempted to assume an
amoral personal existence as well. Such lawyers also could incorporate those qualities
deemed essential to accomplishing their task, such as competitive, aggressive, ruthless, and
pragmatic behavior rather than cooperative, accommodating, compassionate, and
principled action. 8
Lawyers as Directors
Professor Rhode criticizes the neutral partisanship the adversary ethic seems to require. She
opts instead for a public-interest ethic that would hold lawyers morally accountable for the
consequences of their actions. She agrees with Professors Freedman and Smith that
deontological or rights-based justifications have special force in criminal cases, but she
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