Note 11 — PROFESSIONAL ETHICS.

A counsel, attorney, or solicitor, will in no case be permitted, even if he should be willing to do so, to divulge any matter which has been communicated to him in professional confidence. This is not his privilege, but the privilege of the client, and none but the client can waive it. Jenkinson v. The State, 5 Blackford, 465; Benjamin v. Coventry, 19 Wendell, 353; Parker v. Carter, 4 Munf. 273; Wilson v. Troup, 7 Johns. Ch. Rep. 25; Crosby v. Berger, 11 Paige, 377; Bank of Utica v. Mersereau, 3 Barbour Ch. Rep. 528; Aiken v. Kilburne, 27 Maine, 252; Crisler v. Garland, 11 Smedes & Marshall, 136; Chew v. The Farmers' Bank of Maryland, 2 Maryland Ch. Decis. 231. It will be found in some of these cases that though the counsel declined to be engaged for the client, yet the facts communicated were held confidential; the only exception recognized being where a purpose to perpetrate in futuro a felony or an action malum in se was disclosed. Bank of Utica v. Mersereau, 3 Barbour Ch. Rep. 377. In Moore v. Bray, 10 Barr, 519, it was held that communications of the object, for which an assignment of a mortgage was made, to a counsel concerned for the assignee, were privileged; although no question then arose as to the object of the assignment, and the counsel considered the communication in the light of a casual conversation. "The circle of protection," said Bell, J., "is not so narrow as to exclude communications a professional person may deem unimportant to the controversy, or the briefest and lightest talk the client may choose to indulge with his legal adviser, provided he regards him as such at the moment. To found a distinction on such a ground would be to measure the safety of the confiding party by the extent of his intelligence and knowledge, and to expose to betrayal those very anxieties, which prompt those in difficulty, to seek the ear of him in whom they trust in season and out of season."