The Gazette 1983

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. •

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