(Editor’s Note: Judge Vic is on vacation this week. Enjoy a 2007 column from the archives.)

A while ago, I was preparing to guest teach a class in “legal profession,’ the law school ethics course. I decided to spice up the session with a little fiction.

Legal Briefs is a collection of stories written by lawyer-novelists. In it are stories by John Grisham, Lisa Scottoline, Steve Martini, Richard Patterson and others, including Grif Stockely’s The Divorce.

The protagonist in Stockley’s novel, lawyer Gideon Page, takes a domestic relations case that almost becomes his undoing. If you’ve not read The Divorce and want to, don’t read the rest of this column.

Gideon is retained by Lydia Kennerly, an apparently battered wife. She comes on to him and, under the influence of spirits fermenti, Gideon finds himself unclothed in a hotel room with Lydia, at which point her husband Al barges in, takes photos, then disappears. Al’s visit spoils the mood, and “nothing happens.”

Lydia shows up the next day in Gideon’s office saying Al wants $10,000 or he’ll go to the media and the ethics committee.

The ethics class read the story, and I led a discussion. In most states, an ethics rule states a “lawyer shall not have sexual relations with a client unless a consensual sexual relationship existed between them when the client-lawyer relationship commenced.”

Preparing for the class, I ran across a similar case from Canada, written up in the Toronto Star under the headline “Sex with client sinks top lawyer.” There’s a darkly humorous side to the Canadian case, but the incident itself is sad. The class consensus was that lawyers’ sex with clients is an issue that should have an absolute rule. There are boundaries one does not cross.

I also shared with the class a 1990 South Dakota case in which a lawyer had sex with two clients and acknowledged that each of them believed they would receive a discounted legal bill in return. The court held such conduct was prejudicial to the administration of justice. The lawyer, who was new to the profession, young and showed no remorse, was suspended for a year.

The Canadian lawyer was older, had been practicing a long time and was full of remorse. According to the Star, he “offered an emotional apology to his colleagues, family and ex-lover.” Quoting from the Star, “The relationship ended abruptly after A.B. asked X.Y. to meet him at an Ottawa restaurant, where he informed her that during the time that they had been sexually involved, he had also had affairs with two other women.

“In a move that might be worthy of entry in the annals of unromantic gestures, A.B., just before disclosing those affairs, presented X.Y. with a copy of section 2.04 of the law society’s Rules of Professional Conduct. It deals with conflicts of interest between lawyers and clients. He wanted X.Y. to acknowledge that she had read it ….”

A.B. was suspended for six months.

Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Ark., where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at [email protected].