A Study On The Boundaries Of Lawyer’s Duty Of Loyalty To Clients

From the second provision of the lawyer law of China,two key pieces of information are obtained.First of all,the role of lawyers has completed the fundamental transformation from "national legal workers" to "practitioners who provide legal services for the parties".Secondly,the lawyer’s role includes loyalty to the parties,maintenance of law enforcement and social justice.Even so,the dilemma of judicial practice still causes many thoughts.The general public’s view of lawyers is based on the standard of general morality.The judiciary,as a party of public power,holds the view that lawyers should be loyal to the law.However,there are not a few cases of lawyers’ professional groups who "actively safeguard" the interests of the parties or neglect to perform their duties for the parties at the cost of violating the law.It can be seen that grasping the real connotation of lawyer’s loyalty obligation and carrying out a detailed study of its boundary should be the current topic of concern.As a standard concept of traditional lawyer’s professional ethics,it contains three specific principles: the first is partisanship principle,which emphasizes that lawyers should be committed to helping the parties to maximize their interests within the scope permitted by law.The second is the principle of neutrality,which emphasizes that lawyers should not consider the morality of the cause of the parties or take action to promote the morality of the specific behaviors of the parties,as long as both are legal.The third is theprinciple of non accountability,which emphasizes that if lawyers adhere to the first two principles,neither the third-party observers nor lawyers themselves should regard lawyers as perpetrators morally.It can be seen that the basic position of the standard concept is to emphasize the duty of loyalty of lawyers to the parties,and the legitimacy of this claim is based on the moral value of autonomy,partiality and dignity.However,the problem is that there are moral conflicts behind the aforementioned moral values,which makes "how to ease the differences between professional ethics and general morality" become the focus of academic discussion.Based on this,social justice theory and legal loyalty theory provide solutions with different positions.Based on the discussion of role morality and general morality,the theory of social justice puts forward the requirement that "the lawyer should give priority to role obligation in the process of agency,but at the same time give consideration to general morality".However,the reality of moral pluralism undoubtedly sets up obstacles in practical reasoning for this correction model.In order to break through the bottleneck of social justice theory,the theory of legal loyalty shows stronger persuasion.From the perspective of political and moral values,on the one hand,it is to rely on the legality of the legal system and the certainty of the legal system to reduce the burden of moral judgment for the behavior subject;on the other hand,it is to design legal restrictions for lawyers on the basis of affirming the basic content of the standard concept,so as to provide more clear practical reasoning guidance for lawyers.Based on the theory of academic understanding,lawyers should understand the ethical boundary of the loyalty obligation of the parties.Loyalty to the parties is still the primary duty of lawyers,but different from the standard concept,it should be within the jurisdiction of the law,that is,the obligation of loyalty to the law provides lawyers with the minimum requirements of political and moral level,and allows lawyers to have more free space,but also requires him to accept the constraints of the law.Of course,lawyers’ moral obligation to maintain social fairness and justice requires substantial reasons from universal ethics to be included in the moraldemonstration of lawyers’ behavior.Based on this,the legal and ethical boundary of lawyer’s loyalty to the client should be understood as follows.Loyalty to the client is still the primary duty of lawyer,but different from the standard concept,it should be within the jurisdiction of law,that is,the obligation of loyalty to the law provides the lawyer with the minimum requirement of political and moral level,and allows the lawyer to have a larger free space,but also requires He is bound by the law.Of course,substantial reasons from universal ethics still need to be included in the moral argument of lawyer’s behavior,and the discussion of human dignity provides a way to solve this dilemma.Based on the ethical boundary of law,the normative boundary of law is gradually clear,including that the duty of confidentiality of lawyers takes precedence over the duty of testimony and the duty of truth,and that lawyers give priority to procedural justice and at the same time give due consideration to the objective of substantive justice.Therefore,based on the revision of Ruben’s "human dignity" framework,it provides a thinking path for the coordination of lawyer’s loyalty to the parties and consideration of general morality.As the professional ethics of lawyers involves both moral and legal norms,it is necessary to emphasize that the duty of confidentiality of lawyers takes precedence over the duty of testimony and the duty of truth when delimiting the legal norm boundary of the duty of loyalty of lawyers,and properly deal with the conflict of interest in the practice of lawyers.Finally,to grasp the lawyer’s duty of loyalty,we need to further consider the relationship between ethical norms and legal norms.There must be a tension between the ethical norms of "soft constraint" and the legal norms of "rigid coercion".However,the requirements of the professional ethics of lawyers for the group’s emotional identity promote the organic cooperation between the two with the help of civic consciousness,so as to build a rule order containing ethical norms and legal norms.Among them,the ethical norms of lawyer’s duty of loyalty focus on the moral constraints on lawyers,while the legal norms focus on providing practical reasoning basis for lawyers’ behavior.In addition,we should also treat the leap from ethical norms to legalnorms prudently,so as to ensure the proper play of their respective functions.