the Zealous

I can't keep up with what's been going down
I think my heart must just be slowing down
Among the human beings
In their designer jeans
Am I the only one who hears the screams
And the strangled cries of lawyers in love

God sends his spaceships to America the beautiful
They land at six o'clock and there we are, the dutiful
Eating from TV trays
Tuned into Happy Days
Waiting for World War III while Jesus slaves
To the mating calls of lawyers in love
 
Last night I watched the news from Washington, the capital
The Russians escaped while we weren't watching them, like Russians will
Now we've got all this room
We've even got the moon
And I hear the USSR will be open soon
As vacation land for lawyers in love
 
Jackson Browne, Lawyers in Love (1983)

Alex Batesmith and Jake Stevens, in a compelling piece of scholarship, In the Absence of the Rule of Law: Everyday Lawyering, Dignity and Resistance in Myanmar’s ‘Disciplined Democracy’, Social & Legal Studies (2018), remind us how fortunate we are to be practicing law in a society that upholds the rule of law (citations omitted; emphasis added):

In the US, lawyers are ethically prohibited from contacting a party the lawyer knows is represented by counsel regarding a matter that is the subject of that representation. There’s a spirited and enlightening Redline query discussion underway about the practical application of this rule in the transactional context (one in which member jayparkhill commented: “This is super-interesting. It's always good to pull up the rules every once in a while rather that relying on what we think they say.”)

The rule is not without its detractors. Professor Leubsdorf insightfully questions why the consent of the represented party is insufficient to waive operation of the rule. The rule anoints the lawyer as the absolute arbiter of whether the client may contact the other side's lawyer, setting up an inherent conflict of interest: