The Gazette 1983

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GAZETTE SEPTEMBER 1983
BOOK REVIEW
Raymond Cock "Foundations of the Modern Bar",
Sweet & Maxwell, London 1983. 233 Pages, £9.50 sterl-
ing.
In recent years the study of the history of the English
Legal profession has been something of a growth
industry. Mr. Cock, a barrister who lectures at the Uni-
versity of Sussex, is one of the leading explorers in this
new field of history and his book is a study of the Bar in
the nineteenth century and of its professional ideas and
ethos. He is prepared to wonder, after the fashion of
Abel-Smith and Stevens's classic study "Lawyers and
the Courts 1750-1965", published in 1967, whether one
man's immemorial custom might not be another man's
restrictive practice.
He remarks that "professional history is more
complex and a great deal less well known than most
people had thought", and although it may seem strange
that a work on such a subject can properly be called
original Mr. Cock's approach, amply vindicated, was to
study the great volume of contemporary papers and
legal journals and to ascertain what the members of the
Bar and interested outsiders said and wrote at the time,
rather than what they or their friends and relatives
thought when in the fullness of time they came to write
biographies and memoirs and collections of anecdotes
from Circuit, as often as not casting a patina of good
cheer over sometimes quite bitter arguments. These
latter sources have their historical value, of course, but
Mr. Cock has generally used them "to render explicit the
assumptions of the past" (in words he uses in another
context) rather than at their face value.
The comfortable but unhistorical impression of where
the Bar and its institutions had come from derived
largely from the powerful hold that late-Victorian con-
cepts of the Bar came to exercise on the minds of
lawyers. In the last decades of the nineteenth century
many issues of professional concern that had been
debated earlier in its century had died down. In the
middle of the century, by contrast, the Inns of Courts
and the Circuits had been shaken by economic and
industrial influences and by an active (and largely
hostile) public opinion. The railways brought an ease of
transport which destroyed the traditional justification
for the Circuits and the Assizes, and reforms in the law
and in the court system destroyed or reduced the value
of ancient sources of lawyers' incomes. The number of
men (no women until after the First World War) called
to the Bar fluctuated sharply from one decade to the
next, until supply and demand for barristers' services
came into balance. A Royal Commission was establish-
ed to examine the Inns of Court in the 1850's.
Examinations were intoduced (initially, as a matter of
interest, as an alternative to lectures) but were so run as
to offer no encouragement to academic studies of law.
While institutions changed, the membeship of the
working Bar remained strongly individualistic. Mr.
Cock remarks that the ethos of the Bar made it a home
for persons "who were either great by themselves or re-
markable for their capacity to embody some aspect of
worthy or strange conduct". Any Irish influence on the
English Bar in the course of the century derived from the
individuals who made their careers in England, such as
Lord Cairns, Sir Charles Russell or Sir Edward Carson.
Members of the Irish Bar, however, would have been
generally aware of and influenced by developments in
England since students in King's Inns were obliged to
keep terms at one of the Inns of Court in London until
1885, when the Irish Parliamentary Party succeeded in
having an Act of Parliament passed to abolish this
requirement.
Mr. Cock's book, while it of course deals with the
changes in the profession resulting from events such as
the establishment of the County Courts and the passing
of the Judicature Acts, focuses more upon what
barristers thought was happening or ought to happen to
the profession and the way that they did their work. The
author writes in a clear and easy style, and wears very
lightly the great research and scholarship which
underlies his work.
"Foundations of the Modem Bar" is the first in a
commendable new series which is to be issued by the
publishers in co-operation with the Society of Public
Teachers of Law at well below a normal commercial
price. The circumstances of publication might stay Mr.
Cock's hand in making what could surely otherwise be a
claim for exemplary damages against the publishers for
having mis-spelled his name in the book. Any other
misprints pall in comparison with that. •
Walter Conan Ltd.,
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