Lawyering and DisagreementS

MARTÍ, JOSÉ LUIS; SELEME, HUGO OMAR

Barcelona

Conferencia; Philosophy of Perspectival Thoughts and Facts Conference; 2014

One dimension of the relationship between the attorney and her client is what is usually called ?legal representation?. We will focus exactly on such dimension, in lawyering as legal representation. And more concretely, we will focus in only one aspect of such dimension of legal representation, which is the case of disagreements between the lawyer and her client. Lawyers and clients often disagree among each other. They may disagree about facts, or about what is the content of the law, or about how to evaluate the law, etc. But one question of great importance has no easy response in such cases: what should the attorney and the client do when they disagree among each other? And related to this, other relevant questions arise: What kinds of disagreements they may have? What degree of disagreements (of some kind) is still compatible with an effective legal representation of the client? Should the client defer ?perhaps even surrender or subordinate- to her attorney? Or, inversely, should the attorney always keep faithful to her client?s opinions and will, even if they are patently false or misguided? We will argue that the dominant view of legal representation, the one adopted by most deontologic or honor codes of lawyer professional associations, can be associated to a libertarian political philosophy. And we will end the paper contrasting this view with an alternative one, the republican, and will exemplify this contrast with the example of the duty to confess.