University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository
Abstract
Despite its greater pervasiveness, however, soft-core perjury has generated considerably less discussion and debate than hard-core perjury has. There are reasons for this, but they are not good ones. Indeed, we might summarize the matter this way: Lawyers tend to dismiss the soft-core perjury problem because they do not see it as a problem. They do not see it as an ethical problem, and they do not see it as a practical problem. They are wrong on both counts.
The idea that soft-core perjury poses no ethical problem comes from the view that the lawyer\u27s dilemma-or trilemma, if you will-arises only ifhe or she knows the client is committing perjury. In other words, soft-core perjury isn\u27t ethically troublesome because, well, it isn\u27t hard-core perjury. What we don\u27t know can\u27t hurt us, and we needn\u27t trouble ourselves with the fact that it may still hurt the integrity of the justice system
