Beyond Cardboard Clients in Legal Ethics

This article argues that the reliance on "cardboard clients" -- one dimensional figures who are only concerned with maximizing their legal and financial interests -- disserves legal ethics by obscuring important issues of professional responsibility that cannot be examined in the simplified world of the standard professional responsibility hypothetical. Part I examines the theoretical history of legal ethics at the time of its post-Watergate fluorescence. Part II re-examines the theoretical history of legal ethics to reveal an early interest in the problem of legal objectification that was never fully explored and shows how contemporaneous movements in legal interviewing and counseling literature implicitly addressed the problem of legal objectification. Part III proposes a model of partisanship for three-dimensional clients that brings these divergent strands together and places fidelity to client values at the center of a lawyer's partisan duties. Part IV examines the limitations of the client value-based model of representation proposed in Part III.