The legal profession has been drifting towards a commercial focus for a generation, leaving pro bono work far behind, for the most part. But has the drift been replicated at University too? One law student argues that legal education is in danger of missing the point.

Universities do a good job of producing LLB graduates who understand the law. Our universities, through postgraduate training, equip graduates with all the technical qualifications that they need to qualify and to practice law. But our universities do not produce lawyers. Our legal education system is producing young lawyers who will simply not understand their professional duties.

Scottish legal education does a good job of educating aspiring lawyers in the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of Scots law. But it does nothing to instil in the young lawyer a sense of the importance of his profession. It does nothing to communicate to young people what it means to be a lawyer.

Our universities and our Law Society would allow young lawyers to believe that they are just business professionals. Merely learned tradesmen. No more than knowledge-workers who can simply be chained to the altar of neoliberal capitalism and left to bleed their toils into the market’s gaping maw.

They will feel under no obligation to vigorously, unwaveringly and publicly defend the independence of the courts from political attack. They will see no reason to stand in defiance of the state when the state seeks to oppress, to abuse and to conceal. They will fail to see that the law and the lawyer defend all that our society holds dear. It is by the lawyer’s toil that our society, founded upon the rule of law, is preserved.

But the lawyer is more than that.

If the law has any purpose, then that purpose is surely the betterment of our society. If the lawyer has any calling, then that calling is surely to the furtherance of that noble purpose.

I contend that no young lawyer is trained until he understands the importance of his profession.

Jimmy Reid famously spoke of alienation. (He spoke to a room filled with students. How many young people today have been introduced to Reid’s words?) He spoke of the alienation felt by those swept away by economic forces beyond their control. He spoke of the “despair and hopelessness that pervades people who feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining their own destinies”.

It is the duty of all of us who profess to be lawyers to give voice to those who have been left alienated by society. Perhaps as a consequence, as Reid notes, we must be labelled “M for malcontent”. So be it. I wear my badge of malcontent with pride. I am not content.

I am not content while the law remains beyond the desperate grasp of ordinary folk who need it.

I cannot be content so long as legal aid cuts continue to remove the law from those who have the greatest need of its protection. I cannot be content while Scotland endures a legal system which will allow a man to be imprisoned for eight months for airing his views, no matter how vile those views might be.

I cannot be content while Scotland’s Law Officers see fit, for reasons of political expediency, to adjudge it to be in the “public interest” to expend vast public resources on the prosecution of one man for perjury. What of the “public interest” in the prosecution of those bankers through whose fraud hundreds of thousands of ordinary folk have lost their savings? I cannot be content with that.

The present system of legal education will do nothing to awaken the next generation of lawyers to their duties to society and to the rule of law

This limited education says nothing of the duty of lawyers to fight to protect access to justice for those who can no longer afford it. It says nothing of the responsibility of lawyers to speak out when Crown Office abuses its powers. It says nothing of the importance of an independent legal profession.

But I have not lost hope. There are lawyers amongst the current generation who tutor at universities, who take on trainees and who meet young lawyers every day. It is for these lawyers to pass the torch to the next generation. The lawyers of today must assist the lawyers of tomorrow, so that the lawyers of tomorrow can continue to fulfil the vital duties of the legal profession. All those who practice have a duty to complete the training of those who follow.

I am malcontent. But I have hope. 

 
Fraser M Matheson is a student at the University of Aberdeen and member of the Mooting Society of the School of Law

Image Credit: Marina Bailey