Objection! California Mulls Ban on Lawyer-Client Sex
The opening moments of the third scene in Girls Kissing Girls Vol. 13 find Justine Jolie‘s character in a state of disarray. Betrayed by her husband, Jolie tries to piece her life back together by filing for divorce. She sits in the office of her leggy lawyer, India Summer, attempting to figure out where things went wrong. Summer has a unique concept of quid pro quo, though, and decides the best consolation for Jolie will happen between the sheets. Their steamy tryst is one of the highlights of the movie, but if the California State Bar institutes the rule it is currently contemplating, the real-life equivalent would get Summer disbarred.
Current California law permits sex between lawyers and clients as long as doesn’t involve coercion or other inappropriate influence/behavior. The proposed new regulation would outright ban intimacy between clients and their attorneys.
The bar association’s ethics commission noted the reasons for the proposed ban: “The Commission believes that California’s current rule renders it difficult to prove a violation in the typical circumstance of consensual sexual relations. … For example, where consensual sexual relations occur, the State Bar must prove that the relations caused the lawyer to perform legal services incompetently [which] imposes a complexity that is likely frustrating enforcement. …In addition, other professions, such as psychotherapists, have stricter rules that are more protective. By comparison with the restrictions in those professions, retaining the current rule could diminish public confidence in the legal profession.”
Not everyone on the commission agrees with those findings, though.”The existing rule articulates a proper balance that protects the public against unethical lawyer conduct, while respecting the rights of citizens to be free from overly intrusive and overbroad regulation of private affairs between consenting adults,” said commission member James Ham. (Ham probably deserves a free boxed set of all of Marc Dorcel‘s lawyer-themed movies for his dissenting voice.)
It will be interesting to see how the proposed ban plays out, but one things seems certain: lawyer-themed sex scenes aren’t going anywhere any time soon! In fact, the California’s ban might just make such scenes more appealing to fans, since such movies would then have a slight hint of “taboo” to them.
Read more here.
