Gandhi: Truth in Practice, and Professional Ethics
Chapter Fifty
Syllabus topic 2.3, "Some Reminiscences of the Bar - M.K Gandhi"
Pages 244 to 248 of 406
In one line
Gandhi's three working rules were that he would not take a false case, would not coach a witness, and would not let his fee depend on winning, and the incident of the award shows what happens when the first of those collides with a client's interest.
The three rules, and what each one is doing
Rule one: no false case. He warned every new client at the outset that he should not expect him to take up a false case. The result he reports is that no false cases came to him, and that some clients kept their clean cases for him and took the doubtful ones elsewhere.
What the rule is not. It is not a refusal to defend a person who may be guilty. Gandhi is talking about a client who wants a false story told, not about a weak case. That distinction matters, because the objection to his rule is that everyone is entitled to representation, and the answer is that being represented is not the same as having lies told for you.
Rule two: no coaching of witnesses. He says his opponents in South Africa often had their witnesses tutored, and that if he had encouraged his own client or witnesses to lie he could have won. Coaching here means telling a witness what to say rather than helping him say what he saw.
Rule three: no fee conditional on the result. In fixing his fees he does not recall ever making them conditional on winning, and expected neither more nor less whether the client won or lost.
Why a law student should notice rule three. A lawyer paid only if he wins has a personal financial interest in the outcome of the case he is presenting. That is precisely the arrangement Dickens attacks in The Pickwick Papers, where Dodson and Fogg take the action on speculation and charge nothing unless they recover from Pickwick, and where Sam Weller's evidence about it is the most damaging thing said at the trial. The two texts are two topics apart on this syllabus and they are about the same problem.
The conflict the incident exposes
Set it out as a lawyer would, because that is what makes it an examination answer rather than a story.
| The duty | What it required here |
|---|---|
| To the client | To obtain the best result available, which meant saying nothing about an error nobody had noticed |
| To the court | Not to allow a tribunal to act on a document known to be wrong |
| To the other side | Not to take advantage of a mistake made by the court's own arbitrators |
| To himself | Not to do what he had told every client he would not do |
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