ENGLISH LAWYERS BETWEEN MARKET AND STATE - THE POLITICS OF PROFESSIONALISM

By Professor Richard Abel, with a foreword by Lord Mackay of Clashfern

Oxford, 95

Geoffrey Bindman

Rick Abel has long been the most learned and perceptive commentator on the English legal profession.

We are fortunate that an American scholar based in California has chosen to devote so much of his life to it.

I hope the admiration and gratitude of his many friends here reassures him of the immense value of his Herculean labours.

This latest study narrates the history of the profession in the 1990s - described by the author as 'the most tumultuous decade in centuries'.

The story begins with the green papers introduced by Lord Mackay of Clashfern in 1989.

Margaret Thatcher, having chosen not to tackle reform of the legal profession in her first ten years of office, astutely appointed Lord Mackay as Lord Chancellor, counting on his Scottish background to immunise him from the seductive, but stultifying, antiquarianism of the English bar.

His task was to extend free market policies to legal services, in the teeth of protectionist opposition from the legal profession's trade unions.

It is amusing now to be reminded of the spluttering rage and doom-laden warnings of judges and senior barristers at the threat to widen solicitors' rights of audience, seen by the bar as a first step towards the horror of horrors, fusion of the professions.

In retrospect, we can see that the eagerness of solicitors to become High Court advocates was greatly overestimated.

The dominance of the bar in the courts has been allowed to continue because solicitors have not faced sufficient economic pressure to compete; the boom in demand for commercial lawyers has displaced it.

Prof Abel reviews the struggle to persuade the legal profession to recognise values long embodied in governmental and other public spheres and, at least by lip service, in most of private industry.

Lip service is certainly paid now by the profession to racial and gender equality and the structures have been put in place to avoid and, if not avoid, penalise discrimination.

Yet there are still no black judges at or above High Court level, and the number of women can almost literally be counted on the fingers of one hand.

The most dramatic changes have been in the very nature of the profession - hence the sub-title of the book.

By throwing the law open to the vagaries of the free market, successive governments have encouraged the metamorphosis of professionals into businessmen.

Of course, under the surface they have never been anything else, but the ethic of public responsibility is for many no longer part of the job description.

Both Conservative and Labour governments have made a mockery of the rule of law by their cumulative assaults on legal aid.

What then is left of professionalism? Very little, is Prof Abel's conclusion.

Nor does he find this regrettable, for he is a stern critic of the hypocrisy which claims professional status as a means of justifying privilege.

We can agree with him about this, while at the same time deploring, as I know he does, the failure on all sides to provide the mechanisms for securing equal access to the justice system.

This is an immensely important book, but it is too expensive to sell widely.

The publishers should hurry to issue it in paperback.