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The Executive Summary outlines the background, suggesting that “professions owe their origins to the idea that experts should associate for the wider public good and create a set of rules that would licence their behaviour … in many ways the professions are holdovers from the medieval guilds which were both professional and educative institutions insistent upon forming their members’ characters and crafting their art.” My understanding is that while guilds did perform these functions, they also had an anti-competitive purpose, to maintain prices and control who could practise in a particular trade or in particular areas. Trades unions attempted to follow the same route, restricting employment to union members, and attempting to keep labour costs high. Becoming a guild member, or member of a profession, was a step in social advancement, and carried with it certain expectations, in dress, marriage prospects, income, and in social responsibility. But underpinning the cost of these features was the economic benefits of a guild or profession – monopolistic practices. This has long been recognised, and by 1776 was noted by Adam Smith in ‘Wealth of Nations’ when he famously wrote that “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Shaw echoed this in 1906, when one of his characters in Major Barbara observed that “all professions are conspiracies against the laity.”
The paper admits that it is not its focus “to track and endlessly catalogue the causes of the collapse of the professions … but … it is hard to dispute that such a degeneration has transpired.” This, it is said, is because “professions have … lost sight of their necessary connection to the wider public good.” I think that is only partly right, and ignoring the causes and origins of how or why professions were once “moral communities based upon shared expertise and occupational membership” leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of what may need to be done if this civic moral function is to be restored.
There are two reasons why the professions once commanded respect (leaving aside arguments that respect was not universal, by any means). The first is societal: we once lived in a much more deferential society, with finely tuned social gradations. Professions carved a place for themselves in this hierarchy, generally around what used to be called ‘upper middle class’, which is near the top. The second is economic: professions were generally very well remunerated compared to most of the working population, and their wealth supported the social distinction, and granted them a form of superiority. We now live in a much less deferential society (or deference is directed in changed non-traditional ways – Rihanna, the Kardashians), and there has been a sea change in the way lawyers have been encouraged and required to view themselves, in terms of business. The old anti-competitive practices have been swept away. Non-lawyers can own law firms. Scale fees (cartel pricing) were abolished. Lawyers are encouraged – required – to act in a business like way. If lawyers are no longer respected, as they were in the days when nuns bicycled to church, it is in no small part the result of deliberate policy by successive governments. The same respect cannot be recovered by simply requiring lawyers to work for free, when the structures which encouraged that old respect have been dismantled – not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps we – ResPublica – should accept that respect is to be earned, on an individual basis, which would also mean we should not be regarded as a single unified cohort. The legal profession is as diverse in its practices and finances as, say, manufacturing: a complaint often levelled at the Law Society is that it ‘doesn’t speak for me’, which is hardly surprising in such a diverse trade.
It is also extraordinary to lump lawyers with teachers and doctors. Teaching and medicine are overwhelmingly public service professions, funded directly by government. The law is not. Those lawyers who do publicly funded work, in particular criminal work, are a small part of the legal market as a whole. If there is a societal concern that the publicly funded part is ‘not doing enough’, the paymaster should be scrutinised too.

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