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the public. When rendering any such improper service or advice, the lawyer invites and merits stern and just condemnation. Correspondingly, he advances the honor of his profession and the best interests of his client when he renders service or gives advice tending to impress upon the client and his undertaking exact compliance with the strictest principles of moral law. He must also observe and advise his client to ob

serve the statute law, though until a statute shall have been construed and interpreted by competent adjudication, he is free and is entitled to advise as to its validity and as to what he con-cien. tiously believes to be its just meaning and extent. But above all a lawyer will find his highest honor in a deserved rep utation for fidelity to private trust and to public duty, as an honest man and as a patriotic and loyal citizen.

Hoffman's Fifty Resolutions in Regard to Professional Deportment.

THIS code of professional ethics was

framed early in the nineteenth century by David Hoffman (born 1784, died 1854), of the Baltimore Bar, for adoption by his students on admission to the bar "as guides, never to be departed from, and to which they will ever be faithful." Hoffman remarked: "We have preferred to frame them in the manner of resolutions, rather than of didactic rules, hoping they may thereby prove more impressive, and be more likely to be remembered."

1. I will never permit professional zeal to carry me beyond the limits of sobriety and decorum, but bear in mind, with Sir Edward Coke, that "if a river swell beyond its banks, it loseth its own channel."

2. I will espouse no man's cause out of envy, hatred, or malice toward his antagonist.

3. To all judges, when in court, I will ever be respectful. They are the law's vicegerents; and whatever may be their character and deportment the individual should be lost in the majesty of the office.

4. Should judges, while on the bench, forget that, as an officer of their court, I have rights, and treat me even with disrespect, I shall value myself too highly to deal with them in like manner. A firm and temperate

remonstrance is all that I will ever allow myself.

5. In all intercourse with my professional brethren, I will always be courteous. No man's passion shall intimidate me from asserting fully my own or my client's rights; and no man's ignorance or folly shall induce me to take any advantage of him. I shall deal with them all as honorable men, min. istering at our common altar. But an act of unequivocal meanness or dishonesty. though it shall wholly sever any personal relation that may subsist between us, shall produce no change in my deportment when brought in professional connection with them. My client's rights, and not my own feelings, are then alone to be consulted.

6. To the various officers of the court I will be studiously respectful, and specially regardful of their rights and privileges.

7. As a general rule, I will not allow my self to be engaged in a cause to the exclusion of, or even in participation with, the counsel previously engaged, unless at his own special instance, in union with his client's wishes; and it must, indeed, be a strong case of gross neglect or of fatal inability in the counsel, that shall induce me to take the cause to myself.

8. If I have ever had any connection with a cause, I will never permit myself (when that connection is from any reason severed) to be engaged on the side of my former an. tagonist. Nor shall any change in the formal aspect of the cause induce me to regard it as a ground of exception. It is a poor apology for being found on the opposite side,

that the present is but the ghost of the for

mer cause.

3. Any promise or pledge made by me to the adverse counsel shall be strictly adhered to by me; nor shall the subsequent instructions of my client induce me to depart from .. unless I am well satisfied it was made in error, or that the rights of my client would be materially impaired by its performance.

10. Should my client be disposed to insist on captious requisitions, or frivolous and rexatious defenses, they shall be neither enforced nor countenanced by me. And if still adhered to by him from a hope of pressing the other party into an unjust compromise, or with any other motive, he shall have the option to select other counsel.

11. If, after duly examining a case, I am persuaded that my client's claim or defense (as the case may be), cannot, or rather ought not to, be sustained, I will promptly advise him to abandon it. To press it further in such a case, with the hope of gleaning some advantage by an extorted compromise, would be lending myself to a dishonorable use of legal means in order to gain a portion of that, the whole of which I have reason to beliere would be denied to him both by law and justice.

12. I will never plead the statute of limitations when based on the mere efflux of time; for if my client is conscious he owes the debt, and has no other defense than the legal bar, he shall never make me a partner in his knavery.

13. I will never plead or otherwise avail of the bar of infancy against an honest demand. If my client possesses the ability to pay, and has no other legal or moral defense than that It was contracted by him when under the age of twenty-one years, he must seek for other counsel to sustain him in such a defense. And although in this, as well as in that of limitation, the law has given the defense, and contemplates, in the one case, to Induce claimants to a timely prosecution of their rights, and in the other designs to protect a class of persons, who by reason of tender age are peculiarly liable to be imposed on, yet, in both cases, I shall claim to be the sole judge (the pleas not being compulsory) of the occasions proper for their use.

14. My client's conscience and my own are distinct entities; and though my vocation may sometimes justify my maintaining as facts or principles, in doubtful cases, what may be neither one nor the other, I shall ever claim the privilege of solely judging to what extent to go. In civil cases, if I am satisfiled from the evidence that the fact is against my client, he must excuse me if I do not see as he does, and do not press it; and should the principle also be wholly at variance with sound law, it would be dishonorable folly in me to endeavor to incorporate it into the jurisprudence of the country, when, If successful, it would be a gangrene that

might bring death to my cause of the succeeding day.

15. When employed to defend those charg ed with crimes of the deepest dye, and the evidence against them, whether legal or moral, be such as to leave no just doubt of their guilt, I shall not hold myself privileged, much less obliged, to use my endeavors to arrest or to impede the course of justice, by special resorts to ingenuity, to the artifices of eloquence, to appeals to the morbid and fleeting sympathies of weak juries, or of temporizing courts, to my own personal weight of character-nor finally, to any of the overweening influences I may possess from popular manners, eminent talents, exalted learning, etc. Persons of atrocious character, who have violated the laws of God and man, are entitled to no such special exertions from any member of our pure and honorable profession; and, indeed, to no intervention beyond securing to them a fair and dispassionate investigation of the facts of their cause, and the due application of the law. All that goes beyond this, either in manner or substance, is unprofessional, and proceeds, either from a mistaken view of the relation of client and counsel, or from some unworthy and selfish motive which sets a higher value on professional display and success than on truth and justice, and the substantial interests of the community. Such an inordinate ambition I shall ever regard as a most dangerous perversion of talents, and a shameful abuse of an exalted station. The parricide, the gratuitous murderer, or other perpetrator of like revolting crimes, has surely no such claim on the commanding talents of a profession whose object and pride should be the suppression of all vice by the vindication and enforcement of the laws. Those, therefore, who wrest their proud knowledge from its legitimate purposes to pollute the streams of justice and to screen such foul offenders from merited penalties, should be regarded by all (and certainly shall by me) as ministers at a holy altar full of high pretension and apparent sanctity, but inwardly base, unworthy, and hypocritical-dangerous in the precise ratio of their commanding talents and exalted learning.

16. Whatever personal influence I may be so fortunate as to possess shall be used by me only as the most valuable of my possessions, and not be cheapened or rendered questionable by a too frequent appeal to its influence. There is nothing more fatal to weight of character than its common use; and especially that unworthy one, often indulged in by eminent counsel, of solemn assurances to eke out a sickly and doubtful cause. If the case be a good one, it needs no such appliance; and if bad, the artifice ought to be too shallow to mislead any one. Whether one or the other, such personal pledges should be very sparingly used and only on occasions which obviously demand

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