The Gazette 1913-14

JANUARY, 1914]

The Gazette of the Incorporated Law Society of Ireland.

75

Commissioner to Administer Oaths. THE LORD CHANCELLOR has appointed the following to be a Commissioner to adminster Oaths :— Thomas O'B. Kelly, Solicitor, Limerick. Court'of Appeal (England). (Before Cozens-Hardy, M.R. ; Swinfen Eacly and Phillimore, L.JJ.) BEBB v. THE LAW SOCIETY. 1913, Dec. 9, 10.— Solicitors—Women— Admission. A WOMAN is at common law under a dis ability which prevents her from being an attorney or solicitor, and this disability has not been removed by legislation. Decision of Joyce, J. (see GAZETTE of August, 1913, j). 37) affirmed. The action was brought by Miss Gwyneth Marjorie Bebb asking for a declaration that she was a " person " within the meaning of the Solicitors Act, 1843, and the amending Acts, and a mandamus to compel the Law Society to admit her to the Preliminary Examinations held by the Law Society under such Acts, with a view to her becoming a solicitor. Mr. Justice Joyce held that women were disqualified by reason of their sex from acting as solicitors. Before modern legislation a woman had been disqualified by sex from i becoming or practising as attorney, and there was nothing in modern legislation showing an intention to remove that disability. He therefore dismissed the action. The plaintiff appealed. The Master of the Rolls in his judgment said that the plaintiff asked for a mandamus or an order in the nature of a manAamus requiring the Law Society to admit her to the preliminary examination. The Law Society was a modern creation of statute, and the right which the plaintiff claimed against the Society depended on the Solicitors Act, 1843. The argument which had been adduced was that reading the Act from beginning to end it would be found that certain obligations were imposed on the Law Society requiring them to admit any person who came before the Society and complied

with certain conditions ; and the plaintiff said that if Section 48 were examined it would appear that " every word importing the masculine gender only shall extend and be applied to a female as well as a male . . . unless ... it be otherwise specially provided or there be something in the subject or context repugnant to such construction." It was not really contended by Counsel for appellant that there was anything in the Act of 1843 which destroyed or removed any existing disability, and his Lordship said that, in his opinion, all that the Court had to consider was whether at the date of the Act women were under a disability to become attorneys or solicitors. Three grounds were alleged as proving disability. First, it was said that Lord Coke, in language which, his Lordship said, seemed to him not to be so doubtful as was suggested by counsel for the appellant, had laid it down three hundred years ago that a woman was not allowed to be an attorney (Co. Litt., p. 128a). The Court had been told that it ought not to pay much attention to that, because Lord Coke referred in that connection to the Mirror of Justice with the words, " Now what manner of men attorneys ought to be, or rather what they ought not to be, hear what antiquity hath said." Lord Coke was speaking of attorneys not in the old sense in which the word would be used, but of attorneys as a professional body regulated by statute and recognised and created by statute between four and five hundred years ago. It might be that the Mirror of Justice was not a work of the-highest authority, but the reference to it did not in the least take away from the value of Lord Coke's opinion. An opinion of his as to what was the Common Law required no sanction from anybody else. That alone, therefore, was evidence of what the Common Law was, and at Common Law women were under a disability which prevented their being attorneys Apart from this opinion of Lord Coke there was the fact that no woman had ever been an attorney. There had been a long, uniform and uninter rupted usage. Such usage was the foundation of the greater part of the Common Law, and the Court ought to be very loth to depart from anything supported by long usage. Although, therefore, there had been a most interesting discussion as to what was or was