Product Description

An examination of the role of the advocate in the workings of the UK legal process. The authors argue that, contrary to the orthodox view that law is about close analysis of text, law is more to do with persuasion, rhetoric and negotiation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3305624 in Books
• Published on: 1991-12-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 216 pages

Customer Reviews

A Useful Primer
The authors (both legal academics at Queen's Uni, Belfast) have produced here a very useful introduction to the realities of life at the Bar. The various jurisdictions of the UK all receive a degree of examination and comparison, but a study of life in the system of England & Wales constitutes the core.

The authors conducted interviews with many Barristers and some Solicitors, both junior and senior. The wealth of anecdotal evidence gleaned from those interviews is judiciously deployed and provides much that is useful and interesting. However the authors' strong academic knowledge of legal process, rather than the anecdotes, is what really powers the narrative. The effect therefore is never journalistic, sensationalist or puerile, but rather is of a penetrating and well ordered survey dressed with relevant and pointed vignettes which also convey human interest and occasional humour.

An important section of the book explores the problematical and complicated relationship between Solicitors and Barristers. In what makes for sobering and revelatory stuff, the Solicitor is here accused of being intellectually lazy, increasingly unconfident in his own legal advice and unconcerned about abusing old conventions in the relationship; laxity is becoming the norm, and flaccid, unfocused requests for Advice ("Counsel is requested to advise on points X, Y and Z and also to ADVISE GENERALLY ON ANY OTHER POINTS OF LAW HE DEEMS PERTINENT") are the bane of the young Barrister's life.

Yet so long as Solicitors continue to select counsel largely at their sole discretion, without direction from the client, Barristers shall remain beholden to them and suffer their ways. However, some groups of clients possess extraordinary power by virtue of the volume of legal services they buy annually, and not only become expert in the workings of the legal profession but also take a greater hand in the conduct of their cases: insurance companies (the biggest buyers of litigation services by a country mile) compile lists of "approved advocates". Barristers struggle for admission to that exalted club, and counsel who represent "the families of the victims" against these leviathans are usually consigned to a career on that side of the tracks thereafter. Similarly, it appears that criminal practitioners do not tend to drift effortlessly between prosecution and defence briefs at their will, as this reviewer had thought: the Crown rewards loyalty and views with some circumspection the defence specialist who would be poacher turned game-keeper.

Solicitors have long railed against what they allege is the Bar's monopoly on rights of audience before the higher courts. It is interesting then, that although solicitors may now obtain professional qualifications enabling them to appear in the higher courts, only a minuscule percentage of them have taken the trouble to do the exams and seek that kind of work. The truth, it would appear, is that Solicitors and Barristers may practice the same law, but they develop expertise and skills in very different aspects of it. For all but the exceptional, there simply isn't enough time in a typical span of years to achieve mastery in both branches.

The once symbiotic and complementary roles of Barrister and Solicitor are being confused and deconstructed by all these intrinsic and extrinsic forces, and the relationship is degenerating into a circular power dynamic that is deleterious to the overall efficacy of the profession. The Barrister, hopelessly outnumbered and essentially in thrall to the patronage of the Solicitor, must be at greater risk.

All in all, it is a slightly depressing picture. I would have awarded five stars but for the facts that: the text is now twelve years old and in need of a tiny amount of revisitation here and there; and there was not nearly enough about the much-vaunted social aspects - the culture if you will - of life at the Bar, particularly in London, where the richness and uniqueness of life in and around the Inns must be one of precious few compensations for the financial uncertainties, inevitable poverty of the early years and long, unsociable hours which otherwise characterise the life of a Barrister.