A question of ethics

A group of lawyers in the District of Columbia regularly acted as court-appointed attorneys for indigent defendants in District of Columbia criminal cases. At a meeting of the Superior Court Trial Lawyers Association (SCTLA), the attorneys agreed to stop providing this representation until the district increased their compensation. Their subsequent boycott had a severe impact on the district's criminal justice system, and the District of Columbia gave in to the lawyers' de-mands for higher pay. After the lawyers had returned to work, the Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint against the SCTLA and four of its officers and, after an investigation, ruled that the SCTLA's activities constituted an illegal group boycott in violation of antitrust laws.

A QUESTION OF ETHICS
1. Assuming that the lawyers had attempted and exhausted all alternative means of con-vincing the District of Columbia to increase their compensation, the attorneys had only three options: (1) they could do nothing and continue working for the same compensation, (2) they could discontinue working for the district and look for other work, or (3) they could conduct a group boycott and risk potential violation of the Sherman Act (one would assume that, as lawyers, they were aware of the antitrust implications of their actions). In forming your answer, you need to evaluate whether option 3 was more or less ethical than the other two options. Another factor to consider here is that the attorneys, as members of a profession that is regulated by professional codes of ethics, also must have considered—at least, to some extent—the ethical implications of the boycott. As discussed in Chapter 2 of this text, a major component of ethical behavior is acting in accordance with one's values and beliefs. One may assume that there is a strong likelihood that the lawyers did so when they decided to boycott the district. (Whether you, or others, would share in their values and beliefs is another matter.)
2. You may or may not agree that the lawyers' boycott should be an expression protected under the First Amendment. The United States Supreme Court, however, concluded that it should not be considered protected speech. The Court ruled that the restraint of trade was not protected by the First Amendment because, "no matter how altruistic the motives" of the attor-neys may have been, their "undenied objective . . . was an economic advantage for those who agreed to participate" in the boycott.
3. One could argue that the SCTLA's boycott was in effect a "strike" against the District of Columbia conducted for the purpose of increasing compensation. The fact that strikes by un-ions are legal and group boycotts by trade associations are illegal is significant legally and politically, but perhaps not so significant from a strictly ethical viewpoint in relation to this specific situation, in which the attorneys had a common employer. But this situation was an exception to the rule. Generally, members of trade or professional associations do not have common employers; rather, they are competitors in the marketplace for their goods or services. For this reason, agreements among them, to the extent they affect the marketplace, may be anticompetitive in nature. The law is not tailored to the exception, but to the general rule.