Is there a difference between honesty and truthfulness?
For lawyers, maybe so, says Professor Peter Henning in an article for the Notre Dame Journal of Law and Ethics.
Henning posts a summary of the article and links to a copy at Legal Ethics Forum.
Here's the guts of his opinion:
An honest lawyer is one who can be trusted. For the purposes of analyzing the rules that govern a lawyer's conduct, I define honesty to mean that an attorney's expressions and conduct are both accurate and authentic. An accurate statement is one that is truthful and does not intentionally deceive or mislead another person. Accuracy deals with the problem of the technically true but misleading statement or failure to disclose information that the listener would consider important. A deceptive statement would be inaccurate and therefore dishonest. At the same time, a lawyer's statements will be accurate even if they do not fully disclose the truth about a situation. The attorney-client privilege, for example, may restrict what a lawyer can state to third parties, and accuracy requires that the lawyer not mislead while he also is maintaining the confidences protected by the rules of confidentiality. An authentic expression is one that comprehends fairly the lawyer's (and in certain circumstances the client's) intentions.
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