The Gazette 1979

GAZETTE

SEPTEMBER 1979

purpose, and the difficulty springs essentially from the

complex nature of the kind of person he has to be and of

the work he is called upon to do. And the difficulty is

compounded, I fear, by the various ways in which one

may look upon a lawyer and his work. Thus one may

look upon him in terms of the many and varied roles he

often plays in our society — the statesman, the lawgiver,

the person of vision, the redoubtable defender of our basic

liberties, and so on. In {heir paper,

Legal Education and

Public Policy: Professional Training in the Public

Interest,

Professors Laswell and McDougall saw him

essentially as a policy maker, a leader in business, in

government, in international affairs, and they would

direct his education to that end. To one writer at least this

would be nothing less than "a thinly disguised elitist

programme for the training of national leaders, the sort of

thing that might emerge, if, in 1984, Plato's Academy

were taken over by M.I.T. with Jeremy Bentham as

Director".

And then one may look upon the lawyer in terms of the

specific qualities it is said he should have. He should be a

person, it may be said, of "intellectual discipline,

detachment, breadth of perspective, (with) an interest in

human nature and a capacity for independence and

critical thought".

Bracton, you may recall, thought of

lawyers in even more exalted terms. He spoke of them as

dedicated to the art of the good and equitable: they are

like priests, he said, "for they worship justice and minister

sacred rights".

Now no doubt lawyers, or at least some of them, are all

those things. But I do not think they are the things to

which, primarily, we should have regard for the purpose

of defining the lawyer as the object of legal education. I

think we must put him on a much more pedestrian level. I

think we must look upon him as what, in essence, I

believe he is: a person with a specialised knowledge of his

subject — the law — and of certain highly specialised

skills and techniques that are required for the application

of that knlwledge to the business of the law, namely, the

adjusting of human and social relationships. The work of

a lawyer is, I believe, in large measure that of a highly

specialised craftsman.

That is not a view that always and in all places receives

ready acceptance, though I suspect that more and more

people are coming around to that point of view.

Nevertheless, there still seems to be some deep seated

reluctance in some places to accept that a lawyer is in

some sense a craftsman.

Why that should be so, I do not

quite know, unless it be traced to some kind of special

aura that has grown up, (or been fostered) around a

lawyer's work; an aura that deems it anathema to regard

it as, in any way, the exercise of a mere craft. But

whatever the reason, I think it is time the notion was

dispelled. In my view, the mark of a good lawyer is that he

is a master not only of his subject, but also of all the

craftsmanship that is necessary for its application to a

particular legal problem — what Lord Radcliffe once

called the "sheer professional expertise" of the practice of

law. And may I here recall for you those famous words of

the late Judge Learned Hand in his final and moving

tribute to those who had taught him law in his youth at

Harvard: "From them", he said, "I learnt that it is as

craftsmen that we get our satisfactions and our pay". But

then, as has been commented, "by Learned Hand's

exacting standard, a craftsman in law was a very master

and initiate of his art".

Characteristics of the Profession

And I do not fear there is any threat to the higher

ideals of the law in looking upon the work of the lawyer in

this way; I do not fear that the future will fail to produce

lawyers of the calibre of those of the past, or of the

present. As craftsmen, they should be better. As leaders,

as people of inspired vision, dedicated to the promotion of

the common good, I am sure the lawyers of the future will

not be found wanting in these qualities, for the fact is that

in all ages, and in all countries, the law has never failed to

attract to its ranks men and women of the highest

intelligence, of the most singular qualities of mind and

spirit. "There is so much in the study for the practice of

the law", said Lord Radcliffe in a passage to which I have

already made a brief reference, "to absorb the man of

intellect, so much history, so much argument to engross

the reason, so much of sheer professional expertise".

The

law will not fail to continue to attract people of that kind;

its highest ideals and principles, I believe, will be safe in

their hands. But the world needs lesser mortals too. In

this, at least, all lawyers should be united, that they are

competent craftsmen of their art.

The analysis of a lawyer's work that is the most useful

for our present purpose, is, I believe, that which appears

from the paper written by Brandeis J. of the United States

Supreme Court as far back as 1914, which he called

"Business - a Profession". And it is pleasing to note that

Sir Roger Ormrod himself has recently again drawn

attention to it. In that paper Mr. Justice Brandeis set out

to identify those characteristics which he thought

distinguished a profession from other occupations. If we

look at those characteristics, I think they serve very well

to identify a lawyer for our purposes — as the object of

legal education. He said there were five such

characteristics —

1. A highly complex body of knowledge, combined

with the ability to use intellectual processes which

are, at least to some extent, peculiar to the

profession;

2. Certain practical skills and professional techniques

without which the knowledge cannot be applied in

the practice of the profession;

3. The capacity to use such knowledge from day to

day to solve other people's practical problems

arising in the sphere of the profession;

4. A particular kind of relationship with clients arising

from the complexity of the subject matter which

renders the client to a large extent dependant upon

the professional man;

5. A self-imposed code of professional ethics intended

to regulate this dependant relationship.

It is a person then, who has or should have, those

characteristics that I take to be the object of legal

education.

Academic and Professional Techniques

If we accept that, the next question we must ask

ourselves is: how best may those characteristics be

developed in a person; how best may that knowledge,

those skills and techniques be imparted.

Now it would be difficult to maintain that there is, or

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