Trapped in the Department of Justice

I was trapped in the Department of Justice for 28 years, and never lived. 

I actually say that. But it doesn’t apply to me. It is a line of Chekhov’s from ‘The Seagull’, and I am cast as Pyotr Sorin, the owner of the country estate where all the action takes place. He says it.

There are no lawyers in Chekhov’s plays - as opposed to his short stories - and so I am fortuitously cast as the nearest thing. (This is not typecasting, because I have appeared in ‘The Seagull’ before as Sorin’s bullying estate manager.)

In my attempt to emulate Daniel Day Lewis and be employed at the role before playing it, I would gladly have applied to be employed in the Tsarist civil service for a few months, if possible in its Ministry of Justice (the play was written in 1895). But history has intervened, and so I have had to rely on research instead.

I calculate that Sorin must have joined the Department of Justice at around the time of the Judicial Reform Act of 1864. As an estate owner and member of the leisured upper classes, he was almost certainly not a lawyer. In any case, it was the 1864 Act which introduced the professionalisation of the legal profession. Before that, virtually every citizen had the right to act as an attorney. The act not only created western-style advocates, but also a new autonomous institution, the regional Bar Council, which supervised the profession.

As it happened, the reforms did not sit well with Tsarist Russia’s social organisation. Society was still strictly graded, even though serfdom had been abolished a few years earlier in 1861. There were the nobility, the clergy, urban dwellers and rural dwellers, with strict sub-divisions in each category.

Lawyers didn’t fit into this traditional order. Therefore, Russia’s autocratic government introduced a series of counter-reforms in 1874 which sharply restricted lawyers’ professional development and tried to fit the profession into a more conventional social category. The government also created yet another branch of the legal profession, private attorneys. As a result, the legal profession consisted of multiple sections: sworn attorneys, private attorneys, attorneys-in-training, plus pre-reform legal practitioners, known after 1864 as underground advocates.

This all sounds fascinating, but Sorin was bored. One of his many complaints about his life is that he has reached the age of 67 and never really lived.

The amount of radical legal policy dealt with by his department was huge; I have covered only a fraction of it with the establishment of the first proper legal profession in Russia.

The abolition of serfdom in 1861 had substantial legal consequences, too. The 1864 Judicial Reform Act introduced major reforms to the court system. A new system of courts open to all citizens, including former serfs, was established. They were designed to be independent and were separated from the executive branch. The inviolability of judges was guaranteed by their life tenure appointments. The judges had the right to interpret the law, and relied upon their conscience in applying the law. On the local level, two simple courts were established: justice of the peace courts and local courts (which sound like our county courts). They were accessible to ordinary people and handled petty disputes and prosecuted minor violations punishable by a fine up to 300 roubles or by three-months jail. They resolved cases without much expense or written documentation and could apply customary law. They also brought adversarial elements to the previously exclusively inquisitorial court process. 

This is so interesting. A diligent civil servant could have made a substantial contribution to policy-making and implementation, and lived a rich, fulfilled life

Yet it apparently meant nothing to Sorin. The only aspect of his work life that he mentions is when he sings a song called ‘The Two Grenadiers’:

‘I was singing that once when a colleague said to me: "You have a powerful voice, sir." Then he paused and added, ‘But it is a disagreeable one!"'

The local doctor tries to counter Sorin’s sense of failure by mentioning that he had risen to the position of State Councillor. Sorin replies:

‘I didn’t try for that, it came of its own accord.’ (This is true. In the Tsarist civil service, promotion was according to number of years served, not merit.)

It is almost inconceivable nowadays that someone who has had responsibility for the implementation of such radical legal policies would describe their work experience only in the sense of being trapped and not having lived, and just remember a song sung badly once among colleagues.

Critics usually see a sense of doom in Chekhov’s pre-revolutionary plays, of characters unable to cope with the social changes which are about to overwhelm them.

Sorin epitomises that, a gentle and self-pitying idler, who fails to engage with the world as it is becoming.

Jonathan Goldsmith is Law Society Council member for EU & International, chair of the Law Society’s Policy & Regulatory Affairs Committee and a member of its board. All views expressed are personal and are not made in his capacity as a Law Society Council member, nor on behalf of the Law Society