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Law, Tolerance and Society

Truth and the Client’s Interest

Frederick Ochieng’-Odhiambo tells us why truth is sometimes sacrificed to law.

The relationship between law and justice, or between legality and morality, is of much interest within philosophy in general, and philosophy of law in particular. This article discusses the two with respect to the duties of defense attorneys.

Some people tend to be leery of lawyers – especially defense attorneys – on ethical grounds, the argument being that they are devoid of sound morals. In his Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift grumbles that lawyers are “a society of men bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black and black is white, according as they are paid.” In short, they distort truth for monetary gain; they are interested in neither objectivity nor morality.

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