FOOD FOR THOUGHT ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF LAW AS A PROFESSION

Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe (New York & London: Pegasus Books, 2015) ("The lawyers were ready. Around 1150 there were scholars of law teaching classes in a few laces, and some of them worked the church courts, but there was nothing you could cal a legal profession in most of Europe. There were men called advocati, but it was a slippery word, sometimes meaning just a witness, sometimes the patron of a church or the champion in a jousting duel, sometimes an adviser to a judge and just occasionally what we would mean: the one who argues someone's case in court." "That had all changed by 1230: a profession had formed. Lawyers were trained formally at the newly found universities, which started with clusters of canon lawyers at Paris and at Oxford, a town one scholar monk said was filled with lawyers. They were making a living and quite often they were claiming the same kind of professio, the solemn statement of intention, that a monk or a priest would make. Judges would hear only proper, qualified lawyers, which meant that lawyers could close off their profession. They were reviving a Roman tradition, but carefully; they refused the tradition mocked by the poets Martial and Juvenal, which was the underpaying of advocates with say, a sack of beans, a mouldy ham, old onions, ordinary wine or just a handful of spices." "Sometimes these men were true scholar of the law; sometimes 'after having heard barely half of one lawbook they arrogate to themselves the task of pleading publicly', as a thirteenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury complained. The awful standards of the worst ones made it even more important to restrict the courts to men who had studied seriously, three years at least. They were the aristocracy, they thought, of a business in which proctors did property deals, pulled strings and found things out, while notaries acted though they were much more than simple scribes and charged accordingly. In the church courts lawyers reckoned they were much like priest. They also wanted at least the social standing of knights, although they much preferred to be consider noble."  "This was not everyone's opinion. The woman-hating poet Matthieu of Boulogne very rarely put women above men, but he said lawyers were even worse than whores, because whores sold only their arses while lawyers sold a nobler organ, the tongue. . . .  Priests in England had a list of questions to ask lawyers in the confessional, just in case they had forgotten any sins such as helping a client perjure himself, or using abusive language to cover ignorance, or overcharging a client;  an they include a sin they considered just as grave: 'were you ever content with a paltry salary, say four or six pence, which acting . .  in a large case . . . ?'" "Being professional proved a most powerful idea. It depended on the schools and the teachers that banded together in the newly founded universities, in Oxford and in Paris in the North, and the idea of a qualification: a degree. Judges would hear only the qualified. That invented a class of lawyers who were licensed to talk in court as well as read the books, which invented the very idea of a professional class, which in turn became the basis of the idea of a middle class--people with power based on their expertise, neither knight nor peasant but able from the middle to tell both what to do." "Doctors of medicine watched the lawyers devise all this: the university training, the special knowledge, the honorific degree, the social climbing and the income. Doctors wanted to be professionals, too." Id. at 152-154. Over the last few decades much attention has been focused on law as a profession. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the focus was on professional responsibility; that is, the ethics of the professions, concerns about sexual misconduct, drug and alcohol abuse. In the 2000s and 2010s, focuses in on practice preparedness (i.e., being practice ready) and marketing (i.e., branding). However, as one can glean from the passages quoted above, those concerns are not new, just renamed. Are lawyers professional or not?; knight, gladiators, or hired guns?; advocates or mere mouth pieces?, learned or not?; noble or shysters? And, of course, there are the questions surround the aims of law schools.).