Legal Profession and Government Lawyers: What is the Highest Competing Duty to Act in the Public Interest?

Abstract

It is assumed by many scholars that “the government attorney may have authority regarding legal matters that do not exist in a private lawyer-client relationship, including the settlement of a matter or declining to appeal an adverse decision.” Private lawyers or lawyers who do not work for the government are primarily concerned with protecting the interests of their clients, even if those clients may have been engaged in wrongdoing. However, we must analyze if government’s attorneys have a higher or a competing duty to act in the public interest. Therefore, in the first place this paper is about the difficulty of deciphering who is a government attorney client. Then it will analyze if a government attorney fails to determine his attorney-client duties because of the difficulty to differentiate the individuality of the client, if there is a risk of a breach of ethical duty. But in the bottom of all these, the ultimate question is if there is a real difference between private and government lawyers regarding the public interest argument.