Elaine Freer: Social Mobility and the Legal Profession
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12177 |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
SOCIAL MOBILITY AND THE LEGAL PROFESSION by ELAINE FREER
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2018, 250 pp., £120.00)
The impact of the past four to five decades of sweeping socio-economic
change on the legal profession have led many to conclude that it is in a state
of crisis
1
as `inherited professional forms' have been `daily assailed by
forces associated with globalisation, the centrifugal pulls of the new market
economy and the disintegration of cultural or national bonds.'
2
The diver-
sification of the public sphere, including higher education and professional
labour markets,
3
clearly represents both a highly significant manifestation
and driver of this macro-level social fragmentation and erosion of the
traditiona l profession . However, a tho roughgoing d iversifica tion and
democratization of elite professions could also go some way to re-
establishing their declining authority and legitimacy in the face of normative
fragmentation. For the profession's claims that its competence is subject to
objective verification, and its labour markets are meritocratic, rational, and
therefore open, are fundamental to law's public-interest role and hence its
legitimacy. This point is captured by Lord Neuberger's warning in the 2007
Report into entry to the Bar that `The Bar can only flourish and retain public
confidence if it is . . . diverse and inclusive . . . Diversity and inclusivity are
essential if a modern profession is to maximise its credibility.'
4
Yet, as Lord Neuberger notes in his foreword to Social Mobility and the
Legal Profession, the initiatives undertaken to diversify the barristers' pro-
fession since 2007 have `met with pretty limited success' (p. xi). In fact, the
social changes of the last few decades have had a minimal impact on the
Bar's composition, and in 2016, 71 per cent of barristers were educated at
independent schools and 78 per cent went to Oxbridge.
5
Furthermore, the
523
1 See, for example, G. Hanlon, Lawyers, the State and the Market: Professionalism
Revisited (1999); A. Paterson, The Hamlyn Lectures 2010: Lawyers and the Public
Good: Democracy in Action? (2012).
2 W. Pue, `Lawyering for a fragmented world; professionalism after God' (1998) 5
International J. of the Legal Profession 125, at 127.
3 This diversification, underpinned by the mainstreaming of ideas of equality and
diversity and market discourses of individual agency and merit, link to the claim that
social categories ± including `class' ± are now `zombie' concepts: U. Beck, Risk
Society: Towards a New Modernity (1992), and see A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-
Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (1991).
4 Lord Neuberger, `Chairman's Foreword' in Entry to the Bar Working Party: Final
Report (2007), at
5.
5 P. Kirby, Leading People 2016: The educational backgrounds of the UK professional
elite (2016), at
People_Feb16-1.pdf>. Sutton Trust/APPG on Social Mobility, The class ceiling:
Increasing access to the leading professions (2017), at
wp-conten t/uploads /2017/01/ APPG-on-S ocial-Mob ility_Rep ort_FINAL .pdf>; the
report notes the existence, in response to these statistics, of a number of social
mobility programmes, including Pathways to Law and Prime.
ß2019 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2019 Cardiff University Law School
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