Swidler & Berlin v. United States
Case Date: 07/09/1998
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Swidler & Berlin v. United States, 524 U.S. 399 (1998)[1], was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the death of an attorney's client does not terminate the attorney-client privilege with respect to records of confidential communications between the attorney and the client that have been subpoenaed in a grand jury proceeding.
The case revolved around efforts of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr to gain access to notes taken by deputy White House counsel Vince Foster's attorney, James Hamilton, concerning a conversation with Foster regarding the White House travel office controversy shortly before Foster's July 1993 suicide.
Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion, stating that "The great body of this caselaw supports...the position that the privilege does survive in a case such as the present one." In response to Starr's argument that posthumous exceptions had been granted before, and that interest in whether a crime had been committed was sufficient reason to do so, the opinion noted that exceptions had been granted in such cases where revoking the privilege would further the client's intent, such as in estate disputes among heirs, and that there was no reason to suppose that "grand jury testimony about confidential communications furthers the client’s intent."
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