The Gazette 1972

Legal Education:

Integration or Rationalization?

by Professor Hyman Tarlo

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

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