Advocate Satyakam
“Throughout my career at the Bar I never once departed from the strictest truth and honesty. The first thing which you must always bear in mind, if you would spiritualize the practice of law, is not* to make your profession subservient to the interests of your purse, as is unfortunately but too often the case at present, but to use your profession for the service of your country. … The Fees charged by lawyers are unconscionable everywhere. I confess, I myself have charged what I would now call high fees. But even whilst I was engaged in my practice, let me tell you I never let my profession stand in the way of my public service. . . . And there is another thing I would like to warn you against. In England, in South Africa, almost everywhere I have found that in the practice of their profession Lawyers are consciously or unconsciously led into untruth for the sake of their clients. An eminent English Lawyer has gone so far as to say that it may even be the duty of a lawyer to defend a client whom he knows to be guilty. There I disagree. The duty of a lawyer is always to place before the judges, and to help them to arrive at, the truth, never to prove the guilty as innocent.”
Mahatma Gandhi in Young India, 22-12-1927, pp. 427-28
A true lawyer is one who places truth and service in the first place and the emoluments of the profession in the next place only.
Mahatma Gandhi In Harijan, 26-11-1938, P. 351
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