Can a Lawyer Declare His Client Guilty?
The Supreme Court considered whether lawyers can decide what is best for clients and ignore their wishes.
On a television lawyer show—take The Good Fight, the best of the genre currently available—a legal case is all about the lawyers. In a typical episode, for example, lawyer Lucca Quinn must prove her client’s innocence, safeguard her job at her law firm, keep up with her pregnancy-related back exercises, win the respect of a tough federal judge, and protect as best she can her relationship with the former prosecutor—who happens to be the father of her unborn child. She usually succeeds brilliantly.
Oh, yeah, almost forgot—her client gets off. Sometimes.
Young lawyers learn early—in clinical training or in practice—that the actual practice of law isn’t much like. The client, not the lawyer, is the center of a case: A lawyer offers advice, and
