ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE FOR THE ARTHUR COX MEMORIAL LECTURE UCD, 4 MARCH 1999
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE FOR THE ARTHUR COX MEMORIAL LECTURE UCD, 4 MARCH 1999 LEARNING AND UNLEARNING THE LAW
I am honoured and delighted to have been asked here this evening to deliver the annual Arthur Cox Memorial Lecture.
The title of my address is based in part on a book by the English Law Professor, Glanville Williams, entitled “Learning the Law”. I have chosen this theme because I believe it is important to remember that in learning the law, it is all too easy to concentrate on the specifics and forget the purpose. If law is to remain at the cusp and the cutting edge of change, it is necessary to constantly rethink the role lawyers should play in our society.
We should be willing to learn new skills, new applications and to “unlearn” others, to be prepared to change direction, to change attitudes, to look anew at our role as agents of change within the law profession and within society as a whole.
I would like to return for a moment to Glanville William’s book – a book that is targeted at students who have decided to study law and indeed which was presented to me when I first started out as a law student and again on my graduation. Some of you may be familiar with it, although I understand that it is now out of print.
Perhaps that is unsurprising, because despite its useful advice on a wide range of issues, its tone might seem a bit fusty and old-fashioned to modern eyes. The perils of split infinitives, bad handwriting and elocution which fails the exacting standards of BBC Radio 3, might not quite accord with the priorities of today’s students. Male students might be disappointed to hear his opinion that “men cannot improve the beauty of their countenances” but all is not lost if, when choosing a suit for job-interviews, you “avoid wide lapels, buttons on pockets and fancy trimmings”.
You fare better than women, whom he largely ignores, except to advise that they should “dress conservatively, without sexual display, in a way that betokens quiet efficiency rather than fashion”. This was clearly written in the days before Ally McBeal. But it is at least preferable to his other advice to women, namely that along with non-whites, we should think long and hard before attempting to the practice at the Bar. Sadly, this advice was based on evidence submitted to the Royal Commission on Legal Services in 1977, that many chambers limited the number of tenancies given to women, due to their irritating tendency to have children and skive off full-time practice.
That book was targeted at students in Britain, and particularly those in England and Wales. Yet we should ask ourselves how much has changed during those twenty odd years in either Britain or Ireland? To what extent has the legal profession - a profession that is meant to support equal access to justice in our society, to vindicate equal rights – examined its own conscience? To what extent, when students are taught the law, are they also taught a range of opinions and views more likely to shore up than shake up the system? To what extent has the legal profession kept pace with changes in our society, has grasped the new opportunities available and positioned itself to be at the cutting edge of those changes?
Of course the picture is not completely unredeemed. On the equality front, matters have undoubtedly improved. Although there is still a considerable distance to travel – as evidenced by the fact that only 11 of our 182 Senior Counsels are female – the presence of women at the Bar and among the ranks of our judges is no longer the rarity it used to be. The huge increase in women entering law schools and law professions in recent years is a guarantee that the next century will see the full flowering of the giftedness of women at every level and in every sphere in the legal world. The scope for radical transformation is as broad as it is exciting.
Meanwhile however, the legal profession remains in the view of many a closed shop and an often pedantic and precious institution. It is instructive to note in Glanville William’s book, that despite his advice on an almost endless array of topics, there is not one word about how to deal with clients. It is as if the young solicitor or barrister lives in a rarefied atmosphere, surrounded only by textbook problems, fellow lawyers and judges, where the messiness of life does not intrude.
Yet law is fundamentally about people, about the intricacies and consequences of human behaviour. One of the measures of a good lawyer, and one on which there is rarely sufficient emphasis in either theory or practice, is the capacity to deal effectively with people. As with many professions that surround themselves with arcane language which excludes the layman and woman, there can be a gravitational tendency towards vanity within the law profession. The law, in its unfamiliarity, can inspire fear in clients. How many young lawyers, wet behind the ears yet with the certainty that they can distinguish a ratio decidendi from an obiter dictum, have sat in their offices before a client, perhaps elderly, perhaps a person who has never before consulted a solicitor or encountered a barrister - a person, dressed in their Sunday best to meet that legal paragon, and been met with painful deference, even subservience, nervousness and maybe, on occasions, fear?
That absolute trust can so often result in a puffed-up sense of one’s own importance. Instead, it should inspire humility, if only because nine times out of ten, this legal paragon whose expertise is being consulted, will within minutes of the disappearance of the client, him or herself consult the book or the senior partner wherein all legal knowledge dwells. We should remember what we as lawyers are there for: to serve and to assist, to engender confidence not fear.
So often in research on the quality of service provided by lawyers, we are told that clients are content enough with the outcome but unhappy with the process. If we forget the need to make process important, the law will be the poorer for it - and has been.
As the people who will help determine the shape of law in Ireland in the 21st century, you need to look at the changes that need to take place within the profession because you can shape and reshape it if you have the wisdom and the will. But that in itself should not be the limit of your horizons. Law can and should be a springboard to contributing to society in a much wider and more ambitious way.
Inevitably, as law students, your focus is on getting through examinations, achieving qualifications, finding work. It is a system that has survived and thrived over the years, but as with many such systems there is a danger of ossification if the boundaries are drawn too tightly. The world outside is changing. New fields are constantly opening up in business, public affairs, electronic commerce, and ethics. If law as a profession, in the training and attitudes it imparts to students, fails to take account of such developments, other professions will instead grasp these opportunities, and indeed where two or more lawyers are gathered it is usually to moan about incursions into their areas of operation by other professions.
We have been fortunate to have such a fine tradition of individuals using their background in law as a springboard to participating in Irish public life across a wide range of areas: business, the civil service, local government, social services, the Oireachtas and, dare I say it, the Presidency. Despite many of the faults in Glanville William’s book, it is a policy he supports and urges – in fact sad to say about a man regarded as a Colossus in his day, there is little else to be salvaged from his book, “Learning the Law”, at the end of thirty relatively short years. Such a book today would have one dubbed Cardigan Man rather than Colossus.
The intellectual activity for which lawyers are admired is at its best when the limits are not defined by law – or even expectation.
Indeed Arthur Cox, in whose memory these lectures are dedicated, is a fine example of this. A solicitor by profession, he was a key figure in the establishment of a number of semi-state bodies in the early years of the State. He became Law Agent of the ESB and later Bord na Móna and his ingenuity was instrumental in assisting many foreign companies to locate in Ireland, despite the protectionist policies of the time. He became President of the Incorporated Law Society, served with distinction in the Senate and chaired a committee which gave rise to the enactment of the seminal Companies Act, 1963.
Arthur Cox’s capacity to constantly surprise, to continually reinvent himself is perhaps best exemplified by his decision to enter the Priesthood, at the age of 70, following the death of his wife. He became a missionary priest in a village in Zambia.
It was not, perhaps, the obvious career move for an exceptionally gifted solicitor and manager, yet it demonstrates in a very tangible way his openness to new experiences, his refusal to be confined by his training and career, his willingness to apply his skills to fresh fields, to constantly learn, unlearn and relearn anew – to be constrained only by his imagination.
Over 2,000 years ago, Cicero wrote that “the good of the people is the chief law”. It is a motto that I believe needs to be kept at the forefront of our minds as we look to the needs of our society in the 21st century, and the role that we, as lawyers, can play in addressing those needs. That role may be within the law profession or outside of it. Either way, our goal must be to ensure that law remains always centred on the good of the people and “the people” start with each human person. Respect that person and they will respect the lawyer.