Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers Scene 5: Talking With Clients   Reading: "Equitable Awards," in Louis Auchincloss, Narcissa and Other Tales 52-70 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1983). (1) Louis Auchincloss in "Equitable Awards" describes the office where Miriam Storrs works. What does this description tell you about the lawyer who works in such surroundings? If nothing, why do we so persistently assume that appearance of just this sort to be so revealing? (2) We learn early on that Gwendolen Burrill's husband, the man she is divorcing, is a lawyer. What bearing does that have on the story? What bearing should it have on Miriam Storr's representation of Ms. Burrill? (3) We learn during the course of the story that Gwendolen Burrill's husband is not only a lawyer but a successful lawyer. [52-53] Gwendolen says of Sidney, her husband, he "slaved away there [at the firm], day and night, for the last twenty years!" [53] Miriam Storrs attempts to get her client to see that by being his wife and doing what she did, she contributed to his success. [52-53] As the story unfolds we learn something about Sidney Burrill's work habits and their effect on Gwendolen Burrill and their marriage. (i) We learn that Gwendolen's parents had opposed her marriage to Sidney, in part because he was a lawyer. How do you account for their opposition? [See 54, 56] (ii) As we learn about Sidney, we begin to learn more about lawyers and indirectly about the moral universe they inhabit. (iii) Who is Sidney Burrill? What kind of moral universe has he made for himself as a lawyer? Sidney "seemed to search for a problem and a solution in the simplest things...." [54-55] Sidney had a "way of losing himself and the world in work...." [55] (Or, as Miriam Storrs, the lawyer representing Gwendolen puts it, "Mr. Burrill has been able to give himself totally to his profession....") [53] (Both Seymour Wishman and Robert Service hint of this kind of devotion as well). "Work," to Sidney Burrill, "was a sacred concept." [57] Sidney had "almost compulsive habits of work" and "labored hard" like the other young lawyers in the firm. [55] Earlier, Gwendolen protested when her lawyer, Miriam Storrs, suggested that she had contributed to her husband's success at the law firm. "He's slaved away there, day and night, for the last twenty years! Just the way you all probably do here." [53] Sidney "could never break away, or perhaps even want to break away, from those cool, aggrandizing clients who were shrewd enough to know, without ever being big enough to tell him, how indispensable a tool he was to their daily machinations." [55] Sidney seemed to have inherited a brain from nowhere and to be quite willing to place it a hundred percent at the service of his employers. He never looked beyond his firm; he never questioned its right to use every bit of Sidney Burrill for its general purposes. He was like a faithful hound that needed but a single master, and that would probably be just as content with a second if anything should happen to the first." [55-56](You may recall that Robert Service, the young lawyer in Auchincloss's novel, Diary of a Yuppie 7 (1986), reflecting on his relationship with the more senior Blanders Blakelock, remarked: "perhaps he conceives of me as a kind of faithful wolfhound, crouched submissively at his side but ready at a signal to leap, to rush, to kill."). Sidney, away from the law firm, was according to Gwendolen, "a free spirit." [56] "He had no prejudices, no boredoms, no tiresome idiosyncrasies. He was gay and easy with people at parties; he liked to drink and...to make love." [56] "When he wasn't working, he could be charming: affable, amiable, open-minded, funny and interested in all the little things that were going on around him. In the country he loved to identify birds and flowers and to take the boys on long walks. The intensity that he brought to his law practice was also available for the mixing of a cocktail, the solution of a crossword puzzle, or the fixing of defective plumbing." [56-57] "He was a pale Faust, with glittering eyes, who had [in the enjoyable times with his wife] been released only for a day." [57] Gwendolyn Burrill thought she would be content to let the law have her husband's mind so long as his heart was devoted to her and they could make a life together at home. What is the problem in Gwendolyn Burrill's premise that the heart and mind of her lawyer husband could be devoted to such different universes of sentiment and feeling? (4) Sidney, confronted by his wife's view that his clients are "pirates," a view apparently supported by her parents, accuses Gwendolyn's parents of hypocrisy and makes it clear he likes his clients. [58-59] What does this brief exchange between Gwendolen and Sidney Burrill suggest about the professional admonition (and working assumption) that lawyers should keep their clients' moral views at arms-length? (5) Gwendolen Burrill ponders the possibility that her parents were mistaken in the way they "inculcat[ed] in the future wife of a real-estate lawyer such moral fastidiousness." [59] How are we to distinguish between those who are morally steadfast and those who are morally fastidious? (6) Gwendolen posits the following moral dilemma: She could either be a "worldling" who would appreciate her husband's clients or she could "drink the clear waters of the spring of idealism...." [59] She considers the possibility that her parents had been "overprotective" and "had shielded her from reality." [57] (i) Should the worldlings/ideals conflict identified by Gwendolyn Burrill be seen as another of those "classic" moral dilemmas Bowen McCoy talks about? (ii) How does Gwendolen Burrill try to work through the dilemma? She begins by trying to imagine how her parents would defend their way of life. "Had they not always tried to be reasonable, civilized? What rational human being could have seriously questioned their standards?" [57-58] And later: "But what had she wanted? she could her her father indignantly demanding. An amoral education? With Machiavelli as a preceptor?" [59] She argues, to herself, that her parents had gotten the realism/idealism thing worked out exactly right: "Where could she fault the way they had combined the decorative life with the useful one, high ideals with sound common sense, the dues to Caesar and the dues to God?" [58] Gwendolen worries that she has been less successful than her parents in resolving the dilemma: "The trouble might have been that she had been brought up to be unworldly without being wholly unworldly, and that she had not been one of those able to work out the necessary compromise." [59] "Gwen now faced the fact that she had been neither a worldling nor an anchorite. She had always taken for granted that she would be privileged to drink the clear waters of the spring of idealism and at the same time profit from the golden calf, without muddying the former or worshipping the latter." [59] Notes 1. Supplemental Readings: Austin Sarat & William L.F. Felstiner, Lawyers and Legal Consciousness: Law Talk in the Divorce Lawyer's Office, 98 Yale L. J. 1663 (1989); Austin Sarat & William L.F. Felstiner, Law and Social Relations: Vocabularies of Motive in Lawyer/Client Interaction, 22 Law & Soc. Rev. 737 (1988). 2. On Moral Discourse in the Law Office With Clients: Thomas Shaffer, The Practice of Law as Moral Discourse, 55 Notre Dame Law. 231 (1979); Deborah H. Schenk, Conflicts Between the Tax Lawyer and the Client: Vignettes in the Law Office, 20 Cap. U. L. Rev. 387 (1991).   Course Readings     Home Page