<p>In 2001 I began my LLB at the place of useful learning in Glasgow. One first year course in the Strathclyde curriculum was “Law and the Legal Process”, which featured a series of lectures from Professor Alan Paterson on the issue of unmet legal need. Fast forward a decade and you will find a book based on a series of lectures he delivered in 2010 and 2011, under the auspices of the Hamlyn Trust, on topics not dissimilar to that which I studied ten years before.</p>
<p>The substance of the book divides into three chapters based on the enquiring and provocative lecture topics of “Professionalism re-assessed: what now for lawyers?”, “Access to justice: whither legal aid?” and “Judges and the public good: reflections on the last Law Lords”. No doubt owing to the book's development from a series of orations, it reads effortlessly. The topics raised might be challenging, but they are far from impenetrable. A curious layman should not be frightened to pick up the text for fear it will be beyond his ken. Rather, it is the complacent lawyer who should be worried about what a layman might think after reading the text.</p>
<p>Paterson's “iconoclastic” claim that “legal institutions are too important in a modern democracy to be left to lawyers alone” (1) is woven throughout the book. His (re)assessment of professionalism, a subject he knows well (see Paterson and Ritchie, <italic>Law, Practice and Conduct for Solicitors</italic> (2006)), draws on the work of cutting-edge thinkers such as Richards, Moorhead and Susskind and his former collaborator and fellow Hamlyn Lecturer Dame Hazel Genn (see <italic>Paths to Justice: Scotland</italic> (Hart Publishing: 2001)). Legal professionals will be relieved that law's place as a profession is pragmatically and persuasively defended. Paterson analyses the professional compact, setting out and critiquing a professional's obligations of expertise, access (as gatekeepers to the legal system), service and public protection against the benefits of status, reasonable rewards, restricted competition and autonomy. An acceptance of George Bernard Shaw's analysis of professions as conspiracies against the laity this is not. It is also decidedly not acquiescent in the legal profession as it stands, but it does explain that the profession may at times have seemed static because nothing changed for long enough to allow people to forget it had ever been any different (16).</p>
<p>This is not just a book for dreamers and navel-gazers. In addition to a defence of the profession from simplistic...</p>
