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524US2

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SWIDLER & BERLIN v. UNITED STATES

Opinion of the Court

act as counselors on personal and family matters, where, in
the course of obtaining the desired advice, conﬁdences about
family members or ﬁnancial problems must be revealed in
order to assure sound legal advice. The same is true of own-
ers of small businesses who may regularly consult their at-
torneys about a variety of problems arising in the course of
the business. These conﬁdences may not come close to any
sort of admission of criminal wrongdoing, but nonetheless be
matters which the client would not wish divulged.

The contention that the attorney is being required to dis-
close only what the client could have been required to dis-
close is at odds with the basis for the privilege even during
In related cases, we have said that the
the client’s lifetime.
loss of evidence admittedly caused by the privilege is justi-
ﬁed in part by the fact that without the privilege, the client
may not have made such communications in the ﬁrst place.
See Jaffee, 518 U. S., at 12; Fisher v. United States, 425 U. S.
391, 403 (1976). This is true of disclosure before and after
the client’s death. Without assurance of the privilege’s post-
humous application, the client may very well not have made
disclosures to his attorney at all, so the loss of evidence is
more apparent than real.
In the case at hand, it seems quite
plausible that Foster, perhaps already contemplating suicide,
may not have sought legal advice from Hamilton if he had
not been assured the conversation was privileged.

The Independent Counsel additionally suggests that his
proposed exception would have minimal impact if conﬁned to
criminal cases, or, as the Court of Appeals suggests, if it is
limited to information of substantial importance to a particu-
lar criminal case.3 However, there is no case authority for
the proposition that the privilege applies differently in crimi-

3 Petitioners, while opposing wholesale abrogation of the privilege in
criminal cases, concede that exceptional circumstances implicating a crimi-
nal defendant’s constitutional rights might warrant breaching the privi-
lege. We do not, however, need to reach this issue, since such exceptional
circumstances clearly are not presented here.