Do lawyers have an ethical duty not to strike?
IT IS NOT QUITE ACCURATE to say that private lawyers who decline new clients are on strike. After all, they work for themselves, not the state. Nor is what the lawyers did a violation of legal ethics rules. Lawyers cannot abandon clients they represent, even if they believe that they are getting paid too little, but as a rule, lawyers have no ethical duty to accept new clients. If, however, these lawyers acted not individually but by agreement among themselves, then they may have run afoul of laws forbidding group boycotts, which is not, strictly speaking, a strike. In FTC v. Superior Court Trial Lawyers Assn. (1990), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld just such a boycott charge against Washington, D.C., lawyers protesting the low hourly rate for indigent defense work in the District. The court rejected the lawyers’ claim that the First Amendment protected their conduct as “politically motivated.” The lawyers’ real objective, said the skeptical court, was “to economically advantage the part
