The Gazette 1979

GAZETTE

SEPTEMBER 1979

So far as I know, no thoroughgoing investigation of

these questions has yet been made, but I think it must be

made if we are to bring coherence and direction to this

part, at least, of the legal educational process.

Purpose of Student's Apprenticeship

And then what of the other dimension of the

professional ingredient of legal education: apprenticeship?

There is a need, as I have said, to define its role and to

determine its proper objective. But an equally pressing

need, I think, is to being home to all that it still does have

a role, and a very important role, in the educational

process. This was clearly recognised in the Ormrod

Committee Report, but the pity is, I think, that in doing

so it used such expressions as "in-training in practice"

and "practical experience in a professional setting under

supervision". The result has been, I believe, that the

profession has come to think that these expressions mean

something different from apprenticeship, something that

does not involve them in any particular responsibilities.

It sometimes seems to me that the ideal of

apprenticeship in the practice of law is one that has now

been almost entirely lost. No doubt there are a number of

reasons for that. The increasing pressure on practitioners

in their daily work leaves them with little, if any, time or

inclination for teaching apprentices. The tendency these

days to specialise means that many practitioners hesitate,

if they have apprentices, to venture teaching them

anything beyond the confines of their own specialty. And

then too I think there had been a tendency for many years

now to leave it all up to the Law Schools anyway; what

students don't learn there they can pick up as they go

along. Now, I fear, the temptation will be to leave it all up

to the Legal Practice Course; to think that students

should know it all by the time they have finished there.

But, of course, that is not right. Law Schools cannot

provide the experience, the teaching and the guidance that

belongs to apprenticeship. Neither can Legal Practice

Courses. It was never intended that they should. It was

never intended that Legal Practice Courses should be a

substitute for apprenticeship, but rather should be a

complement to it.

I believe therefore we must take some active steps to

revive and restore the ideal of apprenticeship in law; to

bring home to practitioners the sacred trust they hold to

teach those who would undertake the practice of law; to

pass on to them something of the wisdom and experience

that years of practice have taught them. And when I

speak of apprenticeship here I envisage a form of training

that involves active participation on the part of the

practitioner in accrodance with a predetermined set of

objectives.

And then I think we should be exploring ways of

integrating Legal Practice Course and apprenticeship

training. In particular, I think we should be looking at the

possibility of introducing some element of apprenticeship

into Legal Practice Courses. Our experience of

conducting those courses in Canberra has led us to

believe that they suffer from the fact that the course itself

is too intensive and that the students are left too long

unacquainted with the realities of practice; students

should have an earlier opportunity to apply the skills they

are taught to the raw materials of practice. Some field

work during the course would, we believe, not only

reinforce the learning process but also relieve the intensity

of the course. For those reasons we hope before long to

be able to restructure our course so as to introduce into it

some periods when the students will undertake field work

in practice. Modern theories of recurrent education would

seem to indicate that this concept is sound in principle,

and we are hopeful that the difficulties of putting it into

operation are not insurmountable.

Components of legal Education

The next matter I want to talk about is a rather broader

one; it concerns the integration and co-ordination of the

whole legal educational process; the Legal Practice

Course/apprenticeship components of it and the Law

School/Legal Practice Course components.

For the analysis of these various components of legal

education we are, of course, indebted to the Ormrod

Committee Report. That report, you will recall,

recommended that the training process be planned on a

three stage basis —

1. The academic stage;

2. the professional stage, comprising

(a) institutional training; and

(b) in-training; and

3. continuing education or training.

There would be few, if any, who would quarrel with

that as a correct analysis of the educational process. But

there are two things about it that, if not fully understood,

are apt to mislead. One I have already referred to: the use

of the expressions "in-training" and "practical experience

in a professional setting under supervision", to describe

what I think amounts to apprenticeship. The other is the

reference to planning the educational process in "stages".

From the use of the word "stages", there has grown up, I

believe, a tendency to think of the process as consisting of

a series of unrelated, sequential steps which, if taken one

at a time, will produce the desired result. Each stage, it

seems to be thought, may be given without any particular

regard for the demands of the next stage. Those providing

any one stage may, as it were, do their own thing. Now to

look at it in that way is, I believe, both wrong and

mischievous. The "stages" of which the report speaks,

are, of course, steps in the process, but they are also

interrelated component parts of that process, and they

must be seen as such. They each have their own proper

educational objectives, but they must all be co-ordinated

towards the objective of the whole exercise. Each stage

must have regard for the legitimate demands of the next

stage, and each must bear in mind the ultimate goal of the

whole process.

What is required here is also a definition of roles; but a

definition that recognises the requirements of the other

roles in the process, and of the overall process itself.

Objectives of Law School Education

I have already spoken of the need to re-examine the

objectives of Legal Practice Course training, to determine

the role of apprenticeship training, and to interrelate them

so that the one provides a proper foundation for the other.

But we must try too to grapple with the very difficult

question of determining the objectives of the Law School

component — the academic component — of legal

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