The Advocate's Devil (41 page)

The American Bar Association is considering a change in its rules of lawyer confidentiality following the publicity surrounding
the Campbell case. Under the proposed new rule, a lawyer will be allowed to disclose a confidence from a client if such disclosure
is necessary to save an innocent life, even if the client did not say he was planning a future crime. The lawyer must, however,
tell the client of this new exception at the beginning of the initial lawyer-client interview.

Critics of the proposed change
—
which has come to be called the “Ringel rule”
—
argue that if the new rule is enacted, clients will simply not trust their lawyers with information that the lawyers might
eventually have to disclose. One prominent critic, Professor Monte Fireman of Hofstra Law School, has argued that if the Ringel
rule had been in effect when Joe Campbell had come to Abe Ringel, Abe would never have learned the information from Campbell
that enabled him to try to save his daughter’s life.

Abe Ringel has taken no position on the proposed new rule.
In a letter to the American Bar Association, he stated, “Some existential moral issues are so complex that they are not amenable
to simple solution by the adoption of a blanket rule. Every lawyer will have to continue to struggle with the dilemma of whether
or when to blow the whistle on a client.”

Prior to sending this letter, Abe read it aloud in front of Haskel’s tombstone.

P
ETER
S
IMON

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ is one of our most extraordinary and multifaceted legal thinkers. He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor at Harvard Law School and the author of numerous books, including the #1 bestseller
Chutzpah,
and
Reversal of Fortune,
which was made into an Oscar-winning motion picture. His latest book,
The Abuse Excuse
, is a collection of essays. Der-showitz has represented such prominent clients as Mike Tyson, Claus von Bulow, O. J. Simpson, and Michael Milken.