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law shall have some knowledge of the law.

We have already shown that as regards barristers the present system utterly fails to give any security that a barrister is, in any proper sense of the words, a lawyer; and the arguments in favour of the principle of the Association, that a man who is given certain privileges because he is supposed to possess a certain kind of knowledge is bound to show that he really is master of his craft, are in themselves very strong, if not absolutely unanswerable. There is, in the first place, the patent fact that in every other profession to the practice of which a man is admitted in virtue of a degree or diploma, he is expected to give some proof, however slight it may be, of his competency; and it is at any rate somewhat difficult to see why a doctor should be required to undergo a real examination before he undertakes to cure his patients, whilst a barrister may undertake to guide his clients in the most intricate questions of law, without having given any sign that he has ever opened a law book. It may be added, and with considerable force, that if the status of a barrister is to be attainable without study of the law, it would be better to abolish the status altogether, and let any man who pleased style himself barrister-at-law, and get such practice as his abilities or supposed abilities might command. No doubt, under such a state of things, the public might often employ legal quacks; but so the public may do, and do at the present moment; and the evil of the existing state of affairs is that laymen who think they have a guarantee that a barrister shall know his business, find in his title what seems a guarantee, but is, in reality, a mere snare. is, in short, much to be said for treating the trade of the law as an ordinary trade governed simply by the maxim caveat emptor. There is also much to be said in favour of restricting the practice of the law to men who have shown themselves qualified to be lawyers, and who have, therefore, been admitted to a degree or status which is the sign that

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they understand their profession; but there is nothing to be said in favour of first giving men a degree which marks them out as lawyers, and then taking no precautions to secure that the persons so marked out shall have the least knowledge of the law. Add to this that all the other countries of Europe think it necessary to exact from every advocate before he commences advocacy a more or less strict study of law and jurispru dence. This consideration would at one time have had little weight in England, for certainly there was a period when a feeling prevailed which is traceable in the works of writers, even of such eminence as Blackstone, that Englishmen had much to teach foreigners, and, as regarded law or politics, had nothing to learn from them. This sentiment has, however, all but vanished, and the example of France and Germany is certain to have fully as much weight on popular opinion as it deserves. Indeed, it is hardly possible for any man of common sense to observe the care bestowed by Frenchmen and Germans on the due education of their lawyers, and to note also that the English bar, whatever its merits, has never produced a lawyer or jurist of European reputation, without entertaining the conviction that our peculiar arrangements are open to some serious objections. The strongest point, however, in favour of the compulsory examination of persons wishing to be called to the bar is, that the principle of this innovation has already been admitted by all the Inns of Court. As it is, the Inns will take no one who has not attended lectures, read in chambers, or undergone an examination. They, moreover, impose a certain preliminary examination on all persons who have not been educated at the universities. Now, this necessity for attendance at lectures, reading in chambers, or undergoing examination, is simply an admission that in the judgment of the Inns of Court themselves, no one ought to be a barrister who has not some general education and some slight acquaintance with law. The defect of the present arrangement is that lectures,

"reading," and examinations, are cumbersome and expensive shams; but it is impossible for the Inns, who maintain these shams, either to deny the principle for which the Association contends, or in the face of patent facts to assert that the present arrangements are really in accordance with that principle. As regards the Inns of Court, the position of the Association is therefore unassailable. If men are to be called to the bar simply because they have eaten so many dinners and paid a certain amount of fees, then the modern system of the Inns of Court should be given up. If, on the other hand, no student is to become a barrister until he has attained some knowledge of law, then the present system should be made in reality what it is in form. The readers should give much more instruction, and more systematic instruction; the whole scheme of teaching should be revised, and the passing through an examination should be rendered compulsory. There are, it must be added, signs that the Inns of Court themselves perceive how matters stand, and it is, we believe, understood that the Inner Temple is already taking steps for the improvement and extension of the teaching which it gives to students. In pursuing this course, the Inner Temple is making a step towards the attainment of the second, and, in our judgment, the main object sought to be gained by the formation of a school of law.

This second object of the Association is to insure that all persons who wish to study the law systematically shall have an opportunity for going through a regular course of careful instruction.

The principle that a man who intends to practise a liberal profession should, before he embarks in it, have at least the opportunity for systematically studying the pursuit to the practice of which he intends to devote himself, commends itself so directly to everyone's common sense, that it is a little difficult to invent elaborate arguments in its favour. Everyone admits that the knowledge of law is not acquired by intuition, but is attained, when it is attained at all, only by very

long and tedious study. Everyone, again, except an English lawyer, admits that law can be taught as a system; and that the true mode of learning it, as of mastering every other province of knowledge, is to master first the elements or principles of the system, and then study it in detail as practically applied. No inhabitant of any other country but England (unless possibly he be an inhabitant of America) maintains that the true way to learn law is to learn it on no scheme whatever, to pick up one bit of information from books, another fragment from cases heard in court, and a third piece from practice as seen in chambers; and so by degrees, haphazard as it were, piece together the legal scheme which one desired to understand. Yet this is exactly the course pursued, and necessarily pursued, by students of English law. A young man goes into pleaders' chambers; he copies precedents, reads cases, studies text-books on different isolated parts of the law, reading now a little of "Stephen's Commentaries," now a book on pleading, next day a chapter or two of "Chitty's Contracts," and the next a mass of cases elucidating or darkening some trifling exception to some rule of the existence of which the student has never heard. Meanwhile, if he is intelligent, he carefully notices all the business that goes on under his eyes, and generally leaves chambers and becomes a barrister just as he is beginning to have some very faint notion of what the business which he saw in chambers really meant. Now, this plan of learning, eccentric as it seems, has real merits of its own to which it is quite essential to do full justice; but it is not, and never can be, a real substitute for, though it is an excellent addition to, the instruction which could be given by a really competent teacher. Let us, at any rate, fairly master what are the main evils which this scheme of haphazard learning-or rather, the absence of systematic learning-involves.

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The first defect of the mode in which the law is now studied, is the immense

amount of useless, and even injurious, labour which it imposes on a student. The cases which he sees in chambers are all illustrations of the application of rules of law to the actual facts of life. The question generally involved, often an extremely difficult one to decide, is under which of two or more rules a given case comes. Nothing can be a better and more instructive proceeding than to see what the rules of law really mean when applied to facts, and the mode by which these rules are to be elicited or inferred from statutes or cases. Unhappily, a young man when he begins "reading in chambers," is hardly in a position really to profit by the advantages of his situation; he does not know the meaning of the most ordinary technical terms, still less has he mastered the commonest legal canons; he therefore has extreme difficulty in even understanding the points of the cases he

sees.

To comprehend, for example, a quite simple case about bills of exchange; he may have to learn, for the first time, what is meant by a chose in action; to get somehow hold of the rule that choses in action cannot be assigned; and at last, after infinite labour, to discover that bills of exchange form an exception to this rule. If he is an energetic person, he throws himself for two or three days into the subject of negotiable instruments; reads a host of matter which has nothing to do with the question in hand; peruses piles of cases, some of which have been over-ruled, others of which only constitute repeated illustrations of some well-known principle; and at last, when through perplexity and muddle he begins to have some glimmering understanding of his case, finds that it must leave chambers, and that he must turn his attention to some totally different question, say, the warranty of a horse's soundness, or the meaning of certain terms in a contract of sale. Thus, day by day the young man goes on blundering and to blunder, sometimes learning law, more often mislearning it, and ultimately, if he is fortunate and able, gradually and with great labour gaining a doubtful knowledge of those rules which

he could have learnt clearly, and with not half as much toil, from an intelligent teacher.

But "reading in chambers," it will be urged, is invaluable, and gives a kind of instruction not to be gained from lectures. This we fully and amply grant, and should much regret any change which merely substituted attendance at lectures for attendance in chambers. What we do maintain is, not that "reading in chambers" is useless, but that to "read in chambers" before you have mastered the first elements of legal science is a perverse method of study, which is, strictly speaking, preposterous, and entails an untold amount of wasted labour.

The defects, however, of this method do not end here. If its first defect is its laboriousness, its second and even greater fault is that it deprives "reading in chambers of half its use. The great use of seeing actual practice is to realize what the rules of law really mean when applied to actual facts; to gain the power of readily applying them oneself. Now, a man who does not know the rules of law can gain little or nothing from seeing them applied; and the fact is, as everyone who has studied law will admit, that at least half a pupil's time in chambers is distinctly wasted from his having there to read and learn the contents of legal treatises which he ought to have mastered before he drew a declaration, or copied down a precedent in conveyancing. The particular pupil is not to blame, as he really had no means of instruction till his reading in chambers began; but the system is gravely to blame which turns a set of young men into a barrister's rooms, without providing them with the instruction which makes study in chambers worth having. One may venture confidently to assert that a pupil who came to a pleader after having heard a set of firstrate lectures, such for example as a young lawyer may attend in some towns in America, or such as were given by Blackstone himself on the principles of common law, would in one

year's reading derive far more benefit from his studies, and be a far more accomplished pleader than the student who, on the present plan, has laboured on for the space of two years copying the precedents in Bullen, and mastering isolated law points without any general knowledge of law.

"But," it may be said, "law is learnt under the present system and learnt well; though perhaps the same amount of knowledge might be acquired with less labour and in a more intelligent manner." Unfortunately, the evils of the present fashion of study must not be supposed to end with entailing a vast amount of useless toil on hapless young men; it produces a most injurous effect on the minds of the lawyers submitted to its influence. Almost every lawyer will admit that width of mind, a faculty for comprehending general principles, the power of grouping the rules of law in a clear and lucid manner so as to show what are the grounds on which they rest and their relation to one another, are not the qualities in which even the most eminent members of the English bar mostly shine. Yet no one can dispute that it would be hard to find an abler body of men than our twenty or thirty leading lawyers. As it certainly is not want of ability which makes a certain kind of narrowness, not indeed - a universal, but certainly a very usual characteristic of men who have attained forensic success, it is scarcely rash to attribute this fault, at least in part, to the peculiarity of their education.

Nor

is it hard to trace the connection between cause and effect. A man who learns law by practising law, inevitably tends to learn only just as much law, and just that kind of law, which he has had occasion to use; thus his knowledge becomes, or tends to become, a minute acquaintance with one special department, possibly a very narrow one, of the whole legal system. He is never educated to be a lawyer; all his learning consists in familiarity with the law of patents, or the law of bills of exchange. A person, again, who learns his profes

sion by the rule of thumb, being forced to practise it before he understands its principles, is extremely likely, when habit has made him expert within certain very close limits, to disbelieve that the art in which he has become an adept rests on any principles at all. The dictum of a judge, 66 one ounce of precedent is worth a pound of principle," expresses the idea of a hundred lawyers who have not vigour enough to give such a terse rendering of their secret thoughts. One may add to this that the original narrowness of a barrister's legal education received, a century ago, a certain amount of correction from the nature of his practice, which it does not receive at the present day. The English law is itself a limited field when compared with the whole province of jurisprudence, but an eminent lawyer of the last century, such for example as Eldon, could hardly avoid possessing at least some knowledge of the whole scheme of English law. This is notoriously not now the case. Very few men have mastered both equity and common law; and within the narrow boundaries of the common law itself, persons who wish to secure a business are more and more compelled to devote themselves to special branches of study. Hence the knowledge of a barrister in full employment becomes daily more minute; possibly, more and more accurate, but also more and more limited; and to speak the truth more and more narrow. No one can therefore wonder that a certain limitation of intellect is apt to be the defect of lawyers; and few persons will hesitate to attribute it, in part, to the character of an education which most unfortu-, nately stimulates the very fault which it ought to correct.

It may further be remarked that there never was a time when the want of cultivated lawyers who could grasp not only all the bearings of English law but the leading outline of general jurisprudence was more felt. day there is a demand for careful, systematic, and comprehensive legislation; and a slight inspection of Acts of

Every

Parliament shows how very inadequately this demand is met. The truth is that there are several reforms, such as the codification of the law and the fusion of law and equity, which can scarcely be carried out, simply because the men do not exist who have been duly trained to execute these great measures of legal improvement. The very fact that it would be the idlest slander to say that the native ability to effect these things was wanting, is almost a proof that the real cause why we lack lawyers who can properly mould our legislation is, that the bar has not had the advantage of sound legal education.

A layman who considers merely the arguments in favour of founding a legal university, will not wonder at the support which the Legal Education Association has received; he will understand why chancellors, judges, and counsel have hastened to enrol themselves in its ranks; he will anticipate for it a speedy and certain success, and sympathise with the ardent reformers who are already discussing with some heat the all-important question whether the new institution shall be called a school or a university. His surprise, if he is surprised at all, will be, not that the Association has achieved some success, but that it has not long ago accomplished all its objects. If these objects can be shown to be desirable by the most cogent arguments; if the earnest wish of the most influential members of the bar, whether on the bench or off it, is that these objects should be speedily attained,-why is it, he may ask, that the Law University is still a mere scheme instead of a powerful reality? Such a layman will, if a person of a questioning turn of mind, soon begin to suspect that the apparently unassailable position of the Society, contrasted with the very little practical progress made by the cause which it advocates, is the sign that there is something which may be said, or, what is of much more importance, may be felt on the other side of the question; and, in short, that the views of the Associa

tion, though there are many arguments in their favour, may be opposed on some strong grounds either of reason or of prejudice. In this conclusion he will be completely in the right. All that we have urged, and much more, may be pressed with full truth in favour of the reforms advocated by the Society; but they may also be opposed, and will, without doubt, be opposed on grounds which demand careful consideration in the interests of the very cause which the Society supports; for there is no greater practical mistake than that made by reformers when convinced, and with reason, of the substantial soundness of their views-they neglect to weigh the fair or even the unfair arguments by which these may be opposed.

The first argument against any substantial alteration in the existing system of legal education is embodied in the well-worn formula "the present system works well." Of this kind of reasoning radicals are naturally impatient; for they have heard it employed to justify every abuse, from slavery down to the purchase of commissions; but it is a plea which, though constantly used when false in fact, deserves, when true, careful consideration.

In the present case it contains, to say the least, a large amount of truth. No institutions are perfect, but it would be difficult to point to any English institution which on the whole fulfils its objects better than do our legal arrangements. Our lawyers are not jurists; but then it must be remembered that it matters not one pin to a client whether his counsel is a jurist or not, provided that he can draw the right pleas and address a jury in a persuasive manner. It is again extremely difficult for men such as Sir Roundell Palmer, the chairman of the Association, and many of their supporters, to convince the world that the English system of legal education is utterly rotten; since these gentlemen are persons of whom any bar might be proud, and afford, it may be said with some truth, a living confutation of the doctrine which they preach. It should

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