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524US2

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Syllabus

SWIDLER & BERLIN et al. v. UNITED STATES

certiorari to the united states court of appeals for
the district of columbia circuit

No. 97–1192. Argued June 8, 1998—Decided June 25, 1998

When various investigations of the 1993 dismissal of White House Travel
Ofﬁce employees were beginning, Deputy White House Counsel Vincent
W. Foster, Jr., met with petitioner Hamilton, an attorney at petitioner
law ﬁrm, to seek legal representation. Hamilton took handwritten
notes at their meeting. Nine days later, Foster committed suicide.
Subsequently, a federal grand jury, at the Independent Counsel’s re-
quest, issued subpoenas for, inter alia, the handwritten notes as part of
an investigation into whether crimes were committed during the prior
investigations into the ﬁrings. Petitioners moved to quash, arguing,
among other things, that the notes were protected by the attorney-
client privilege. The District Court agreed and denied enforcement of
the subpoenas.
In reversing, the Court of Appeals recognized that
most courts assume the privilege survives death, but noted that such
references usually occur in the context of the well-recognized testamen-
tary exception to the privilege allowing disclosure for disputes among
the client’s heirs. The court declared that the risk of posthumous reve-
lation, when conﬁned to the criminal context, would have little to no
chilling effect on client communication, but that the costs of protecting
communications after death were high. Concluding that the privilege
is not absolute in such circumstances, and that instead, a balancing test
should apply, the court held that there is a posthumous exception to the
privilege for communications whose relative importance to particular
criminal litigation is substantial.

Held: Hamilton’s notes are protected by the attorney-client privilege.
This Court’s inquiry must be guided by “the principles of the common
law . . . as interpreted by the courts . . . in light of reason and experi-
ence.” Fed. Rule Evid. 501. The relevant case law demonstrates that
it has been overwhelmingly, if not universally, accepted, for well over a
century, that the privilege survives the client’s death in a case such as
this. While the Independent Counsel’s arguments against the privi-
lege’s posthumous survival are not frivolous, he has simply not satisﬁed
his burden of showing that “reason and experience” require a departure
from the common-law rule. His interpretation—that the testamentary
exception supports the privilege’s posthumous termination because in
practice most cases have refused to apply the privilege posthumously;