Court Opinion

ID: 9425439
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:14:40.886278+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:55.565331
License: Public Domain

*730Mr. Chief Justice Burger,
with whom Mr. Justice Rehnquist joins, dissenting.
I agree generally with Mr. Justice Rehnquist’s dissent and add a few observations.
In the rapidly shrinking “one world” we live in there are numerous reasons why the States might appropriately consider relaxing some of the restraints on the practice of professions by aliens. The fundamental factor, however, is that the States reserved, among other powers, that of regulating the practice of professions within their own borders. If that concept has less validity now than in the 18th century when it was made part of the “bargain” to create a federal union, it is nonetheless part of that compact.
A large number of American nationals are admitted to the practice of law in more than a dozen countries; this will expand as world trade enlarges. But the question for the Court is not what is enlightened or sound policy but rather what the Constitution and its Amendments provide; I am unable to accord to the Fourteenth Amendment the expansive reading the Court gives it.
In recent years the Court, in a rather casual way, has articulated the code phrase “suspect classification” as though it embraced a reasoned constitutional concept. Admittedly, it simplifies judicial work as do “per se” rules, but it tends to stop analysis while appearing to suggest an analytical process.
Much as I agree with some aspects of the policy implicit in the Court’s holding, I am bound — if I apply the Constitution as its words and intent speak to me — to reject the good policy the Court now adopts.
I am unwilling to accept what seems to me a denigration of the posture and role of a lawyer as an “officer of the court.” It is that role that a State is entitled to rely on as a basis for excluding aliens from the practice *731of law. By virtue of his admission a lawyer is granted what can fairly be called a monopoly of sorts; he is granted a license to appear and try cases; he can cause witnesses to drop their private affairs and be called for depositions and other pretrial processes that, while subject to the ultimate control of the court, are conducted by lawyers outside courtrooms; the enormous power of cross-examination of witnesses is granted exclusively to lawyers. Inherent in these large powers is the ability to compel answers subject, of course, to such limiting restraints as the Fifth Amendment and rules of evidence. In most States a lawyer is authorized to issue subpoenas commanding the presence of persons and even the production of documents under certain circumstances. The broad monopoly granted to lawyers is the authority to practice a profession and by virtue of that to do things other citizens may not lawfully do. In the common-law tradition the lawyer becomes the attorney — the agent— for a client only by virtue of his having been first invested with power by the State, usually by a court. The lawyer’s obligations as an officer of the court permit the court to call on the lawyer to perform duties which no court could order citizens generally to do, including the obligation to observe codes of ethical conduct not binding on the public generally.
The concept of a lawyer as an officer of the court and hence part of the official mechanism of justice in the sense of other court officers, including the judge, albeit with different duties, is not unique in our system but it is a significant feature of the lawyer’s role in the common law. This concept has sustained some erosion over the years at the hands of cynics who view the lawyer much as the “hired gun” of the Old West. In less flamboyant terms the lawyer in his relation to the client came to be called a “mouthpiece” in the gangland parlance of the 1930’s. Under this bleak view of the profession the *732lawyer, once engaged, does his client’s bidding, lawful or not, ethical or not.
Whatever the erosion of the officer-of-the-court role, the overwhelming proportion of the legal profession rejects both the denigrated role of the advocate and counselor that renders him a lackey to the client and the alien idea that he is an agent of government. See American Bar Association Project on Standards for Criminal Justice, The Prosecution Function and the Defense Function § 1.1 (Approved Draft 1971).
The role of a lawyer as an officer of the court predates the Constitution; it was carried over from the English system and became firmly embedded in our tradition. It included the obligation of first duty to client. But that duty never was and is not today an absolute or unqualified duty. It is a first loyalty to serve the client’s interest but always within — never outside — the law, thus placing a heavy personal and individual responsibility on the lawyer. That this is often unenforceable, that departures from it remain undetected, and that judges and bar associations have been singularly tolerant of misdeeds of their brethren, renders it no less important to a profession that is increasingly crucial to our way of life. The very independence of the lawyer from the government on the one hand and client on the other is what makes law a profession, something apart from trades and vocations in which obligations of duty and conscience play a lesser part. It is as crucial to our system of justice as the independence of judges themselves.
The history of the legal profession is filled with accounts of lawyers who risked careers by asserting their independent status in opposition to popular and governmental attitudes, as John Adams did in Boston to defend the soldiers accused in what we know in our folklore as the “Boston Massacre.” To that could be added the *733lawyers who defended John Peter Zenger and down to lawyers in modern times in cases such as Johnson v. Zerbst, 304 U. S. 458 (1938). The crucial factor in all these cases is that the advocates performed their dual role — officer of the court and advocate for a client— strictly within and never in derogation of high ethical standards. There is thus a reasonable, rational basis for a State to conclude that persons owing first loyalty to this country will grasp these traditions and apply our concepts more than those who seek the benefits of American citizenship while declining to accept the burdens of citizenship in this country.
In some countries the legal system is so structured that all lawyers are literally agents of government and as such bound to place the interests of government over those of the client. That concept is so alien to our system with an independent bar that I find it difficult to see how nationals of such a country, inculcated with those ideas and at the same time unwilling to accept American citizenship, could be properly integrated into our system. At the very least we ought not stretch the Fourteenth Amendment to force the States to accept any national of any country simply because of a recital of the required oath and passing of the bar examination.
Since the Court now strikes down a power of the States accepted as fundamental since 1787, even if States sometimes elected not to exercise it, cf. Bradwell v. State, 16 Wall. 130 (1873), the States may well move to adopt, by statute or rule of court, a reciprocal proviso, familiar in other contexts; under such a reciprocal treatment of applicants a State would admit to the practice of law the nationals of such other countries as admit American citizens to practice. I find nothing in the core holding of Zschernig v. Miller, 389 U. S. 429 (1968), to foreclose state adoption of such reciprocal provisions. See Clark v. Allen, 331 U. S. 503 (1947).