Today’s leader by Catrin Griffiths in The Lawyer revisits the evergreen topic of legal education, following Slaughter and May’s decision to separate the recruitment process between law and non-law graduates. The Lawyer ran a story picking up on the firm’s evident inundation with applications by non-law graduates, and, as Griffiths writes, not everyone appears to believe that those in this category make good lawyers.
“The lawyers who have not undertaken a law degree are not properly trained,” said one comment to the debate, adding that “Just as degrees in English, History and Basket Weaving do not qualify people to be doctors, they also do not qualify people to be lawyers.” Elsewhere, irritation with the fact that people could complete “essentially worthless degrees, such as English or History,” before converting to law was roundly condemned.
Griffiths doesn’t side with the traditionalists, saying that “the profession needs lawyers with intellectual curiosity from different academic backgrounds. The ability to assimilate Beowulf or early Hegelian Marx is probably just as useful to a City practitioner as family law.”
We’d go further. A prior degree is not only enriching in its own right, it also helps with the oft-overlooked requirement that, to be a good lawyer, you need not to be a pompous ass but instead to have the ability to communicate and get on with people. Do those commenting on this debate who castigate non-law degrees as “worthless” thereby regard their clients, who may well have quite a few such degrees, as somehow inadequate? Sadly, making such an inference is inevitable.
We propose that law graduates who insist that theirs is the only true path be given a sabbatical in which they can read Joyce, think about Marx and maybe do some basket weaving. They might learn something and, heaven forfend, they might even enjoy themselves.
Meanwhile, as EllenJo’s photo shows, yet another non-law graduate shamelessly declares his intention to become a lawyer.
