From a reader:

I’m really surprised a conservative is challenging attorney-client privilege. I’m no lawyer, but I daresay it’s a pretty old institution, and one that provides extraordinary protections against state intrusion. The right to a jury trial is one of the key limitations on the power of the State; and the State and its officers, always desiring to expand their powers, would be glad to take any opportunity to reduce this limitation’s constraints. If attorneys were required to testify against their clients in some circumstances, they would eventually have to testify against them in all circumstances. It is the government’s duty to convict the guilty and spare the innocent, and not a citizen’s duty to endanger their own case to correct the State’s error. Yes, the privilege does occasionally hurt some individual. But a court of law is an individual’s opportunity to assert their own individual rights, regardless of those rights’ consquences for the general population. Those rights protect every individual, always — I’m afraid we have to risk, and suffer, the occasional travesty. Maybe you agree with those general principles, but think that in a particular case a particular attorney is morally obliged to act to free the innocent — and should then suffer the loss of his legal career, in affirmation of those principles. (It might be a bit like some accounts of the ethics of torture — wrong as policy, occasionally called for and justified by extraordinary situations. Actually, a comparison of liberal attitudes on torture and attorney client privilege might be revealing.) Even so, I’m really not sure how such principles would be enacted. Our society is so obsessed with “fairness” that the idea of someone losing their career for doing the right thing wouldn’t be tolerated, and some path to restoring an informing attorney to the bar would be found, and we would in the process have created a duty to the State over and above a duty to the client. So while I might understand an attorney’s decision to speak up, I don’t think I’d urge one to do so. No, I don’t care for lawyers, generally. But I don’t resent their privileges — I resent the use they often make of them, and the sanctimony behind which they often hide their self-serving behavior.

Me: I think the reader makes many fine points. But I don’t think I’m nearly as opposed to attorney-client privilege as he infers and implies. Indeed, a dozen or so lawyer-readers have already emailed me to say that from the known facts the lawyer in question was wrong to behave the way he did. My original point was simply this: that legal ethics, while often necessary and valuable, are also sometimes merely means for lawyers to protect themselves and their jobs and that the term “legal ethics” doesn’t not overlap perfectly with “the right thing to do.”

Update: From a reader who’s a more attentive, uh, reader than me:

Your e-mailer writes: “If attorneys were required to testify against their clients in some circumstances, they would eventually have to testify against them in all circumstances.” WHAT? First of all, they are currently required to testify against them in some circumstances, just not about confidential comments made in connection with representation. Second, the first thing you get rid of in law school, other than pleasure reading, is the “where do you draw the line” or “who is to say” arguments. That’s the whole point of law school: thre have to be lines, drawn by somebody. So to say if lawyers had to rat out client’s to save wrongly convicted murderers is to create line drawing problems, welcome aboard.