The Gazette 1972

Legal Education: Integration or Rationalization? by Professor Hyman Tarlo

of affairs existing in that country as to legal education. The story of their attempts to change the system during the last century and a quarter, as chronicled in Chapter 1 of the Report, is a sad and frustrating one. There were so many sound and progressive proposals which never came to fruition. "The history of legal education in England over the past 120 years is largely an account of the struggle to implement the recommendations of the 1846 Committee [Select Committee on Legal Edu- cation] and the effects of that struggle". (Para. 19.) This Committee had, within three months, produced a report "which contains a remarkable and far-sighted study of the whole problem of education for the legal profession". (Para. 14) The aspects of providing both adequate education in the law and professional training, emphasized by the 1846 Committee, were unfortunately subordinated by the legal profession to the third aspect underlined by that Committee, the setting up of an adequate system of qualifying examinations. This could with some truth also be said of the history of legal education in Ireland. The Ormrod Report's principal recommendations constitute a deliberate further attempt to remedy a situation which has for too long been bedevilled by the consequences of having two separate branches of the legal profession, each with its own separate educational and training requirements and each jealous of its mon- opolies and privileges. If the Report is implemented, the subordinate status of the university law degree will be upgraded so that almost the entire legal profession will be university educated and so in time may be truly said to be a learned one. At the same time, there will be or- ganised vocational training for which there has always been a significant need. Integration of academic and vocational legal education The very first conclusion reached by the Committee is that academic and vocational legal education should as far as possible be integrated into a coherent whole. Comparison is made, as it is in other parts of the Report, with the medical degree which has a qualification status in its own right. This has meant that university medical faculties have always had to make some provision for the vocational or practical aspect of the training of medical students and have, therefore, had to remain closely associated with the practising profession. Pro- fessors of medicine "are in active professional practice in the teaching hospitals and there is a free two-way traffic between academic and hospital medicine. The law faculties, on the other hand, have become isolated from the practising profession. If the law degree were to be recognised as the major part of the qualification to practice this tendency would be reversed and the

The Report of the Committee on Legal Education [in England and Wales], March 1971, Cmnd. 4595 ("the Ormrod Report"), is to be welcomed, not only for its extensive survey of English legal education and its various proposals or reform, but also for its survey in concise form (in Appendix D) of legal education in thirteen other countries as different from each other as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Scotland, South Africa, Sweden and the United States of America. These twenty-two pages constitute a valuable section of the Report and are well worth perusal notwithstanding the small print The terms of reference of the Committee did not include Scotland or Northern Ireland. The survey of other countries, while it covers Scotland, does not include Ireland, either North or South. Perhaps Irish legal education cannot be regarded as sufficiently distinctive in comparison with that of England and Wales, and this is largely true as to the general scheme of things. There is in Ireland, however, nothing really comparable with the schools of law conducted by the Bar and the solicitors in England. The Committee, after studying the other systems and allowing for the important differences between the legal systems and professions of those countries—particularly the Civil Law countries—and England, drew conclusions which went much of the way to support their recommen- dations. The impression which the members gained was that the wide range of permutations and differences in other countries was really only variations on a central theme or basic pattern, namely, that legal education is conducted almost entirely at university law school or law colleges, that entry to the legal profession is almost always by way of acquiring a university law degree followed by a period of apprenticeship, and that, on the whole, faith in apprenticeship seems to be waning. (Para. 68). The present writer, with some first-hand knowledge of several Common Law countries, offers a few comments on aspects of the Report, in the belief that those who seek to reform legal education in Ireland, perhaps on the basis of the Committee's recommen- dations for England, will wish to consider the exper- ience of other countries with legal systems similar to Ireland's. Consequently, special (if limited) reference will be made to legal education in Australasia. (Though Scotland has a rather different legal system, its pro- gressive legal education structure, not dissimilar in many respects from Australasia's, could also profitably be studied.) Frustrated attempts at reform in England Many English lawyers (and that term includes law teachers) have for long been dissatisfied with the state

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