The Bodyguards of Lies

Description

This book uses real-world examples, case studies, and commentary from practitioners to reveal the many and varied strategies American and English lawyers use to protect truth.
It shows how they tackle their conflicting duties, and highlights the ‘tragic choices’ lawyers everywhere routinely make through their ‘power of decision’. What emerges are new ways of understanding the critical role lawyers play in society – and their professional responsibilities.
‘Truth is so precious it should always be protected by a bodyguard of lies.’ Churchill said this about wartime deception plans, but lawyers’ clients may think their truth – especially an ‘inconvenient truth’ – is so precious it too should be protected. Lawyers are ‘bodyguards of lies’ when they use so-called ‘tricks of the trade’ not only to keep clients’ secrets but to construct a reality that is far from real. But should they? Lawyers have a divided loyalty.
The book presents a unique and fascinating account of what happens when lawyers’ duties to clients conflict with their duties to the legal system, and looks in detail at the ethical codes and laws that regulate their conduct.

Christopher Whelan is Associate Director of International Law Programmes and Member of the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford, UK, Barrister at 3PB, UK, and Visiting Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University School of Law in Virginia, USA.

Part A: Setting the Scene: The Truth About Lies
1. Introduction
2. The Lawyers Role: ‘Hired Guns’ and/or ‘Heroes’?
3. Lawyers: A Divided Loyalty
Part B: Strategies to Protect the Truth
4. Keeping Confidentiality:Tragic Choices
5. Lying with the Law:The Lecture
6. The Inconvenient Truth: Selective Ignorance and Wilful Blindness
007. Lie Sense and Licence to Lie
8. Exploring the Outer Space of Law
9. Creative Compliance: Legal = Ethical
10. Lying with the Sword of Truth and the Dagger of Deceit
11. The Smoking Gun
12. A Sporting Chance: Courtroom Tactics in a Criminal Context
13. Effective Advocacy
14. Courting the Court of Public Opinion
Part C: Bodyguard Ethics
15. The Dynamics of Decision-Making: The Pit and the Pendulum
16. The Dynamics of Ethical Judgment
Part D: Conclusion
17. Bodyguards of Lies: Power and Responsibility
References