…all the way through their education, that is. A pure focus on the law, says Lord Sumption, makes for too narrowly-focused lawyers.
These comments of Lord Sumption’s in a recent Counsel magazine article have resulted in some interesting discussion on the topic. From the Telegraph:
“I think that it is best not to read law as an undergraduate,” Lord Sumption told Counsel magazine. “The problem is that we have a generation of lawyers, and this applies to solicitors as well as barristers, who are coming into the profession with much less in the way of general culture than their predecessors. It is very unfortunate, for example, that many of them cannot speak or read a single language other than their own.”
This might be more of a problem (if one agrees with Lord Sumption) in the UK than the US, I am not sure (although I will say I was surprised to find that most lawyers never took Latin or French.) Is part of this due to the way the school system is designed? In the US, one graduates from “high school” at age 18, then goes to “college” or “university” for an undergraduate degree. While some do major in “pre-law,” most do not. Many who end up in the legal field first attend university, majoring in business administration or economics (or perhaps international business) or such, then, upon graduating, enter a JD program as a master’s program (though in the US, confusingly, it is a Juris Doctor, not a Masters: one must finish the JD, then an LLM, and only then a Doctor of Laws. There is a historical reason for this, the result of the efforts of a Supreme Court Justice).
Read the Telegraph article here.
Read the Journal online article here.
Read Charon QC’s blog post here, where he writes that Sumption makes some good points, but wonders at his evidence, and uses that to point to Jonathan Dworkin’s response to Sumption’s comments about Dworkin’s “throwing rocks” into academic resource.
This piqued my attention, of course, have worked my way through three masters and a PhD in theology before obtaining a law degree. Will this make me a better lawyer? Currently working as a law clerk under other attorneys at the trial court level, I would say “perhaps.” My previous experience has certainly helped me to be able to research more efficiently and write a lot faster and better. I suspect the difference would be more apparent at the appellate level, which I have had only a little experience so far. Along with Charon QC, I would like to hear the specific grounds of Lord Sumption’s claim.