Five years ago this month, I took a tour of Queen’s University’s campus on one of their fall tour days.
Walking around my future undergraduate home for the first time, it became clear it’s the parents—rather than students—who pose the majority of questions to our guides. “Well my son is going to be a doctor so what kind of marks should he get in grade 12 Earth Sciences?” asked one mother, while another wondered “Does Queen’s have a residence for students who want to be teachers?” The real gem came from a father when he asked, “How does Queen’s pre-law program compare to that of other schools?”
As I listened to the guardians of Canada’s next generation of lawyers, doctors and teachers demand guidance from fresh-faced campus tour guides, I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do.
Apparently I only had three choices. Though I know now that Queen’s also offers career-track training for would-be investment bankers, it’s worth considering the first three “default” professions to understand the different degrees of professional respect they’re accorded.
Doctors and teachers are public servants—they’re supported by public budget expenditures and they satisfy the basic human needs of health care and education. Not only do parents of doctors and teachers hold their children in high esteem, but it seems as though society itself gives an approving nod to these publicly-funded healers and educators.
Lawyers, although they follow a professional code of conduct that conceives of the public interest, reap only praise for individual success. The profession itself is the object of wider social contempt. However, like health and education, justice is also pursued in the public interest and obtained through the expenditure of what Richard Susskind calls “finite legal resources” in his 2006 book, The End of Lawyers?
One primary difference for lawyers is they exert unparalleled influence over their own professional milieu, which extends beyond governing their own profession. In Western countries, it’s often lawyers who become key lawmakers. As Susskind says, with increasing social complexity and scales of governance, law is becoming a means of “hyper-regulation.” It is also “our main form of social control.”
I understand the law itself can be binding and inaccessible yet socially constructed source of frustration for which we must pay to understand. What exactly constitutes good health and solid primary education is contested, but neither field seems subject to the political debate. Since “you need to know rather a lot about the law to recognize not just that you need legal help but when best to seek such counsel,” it seems clear to Susskind that a just society requires that “legal insight [be] an evenly distributed resource.” Lawyers are perceived to be encouraging—or at least accepting—this unjust distribution. As Susskind says, information technology and the commoditization of legal knowledge are transforming sources of legal advice for citizens.
The key question for me is what role lawyers will play in resisting or encouraging this transformation.
Mandatory contributions to pro bono funds, legal insurance schemes, new investments in public legal aid, increased public access to legal knowledge and processes as well as lawmaking, and policies to promote diversity in the profession are critical in the face of new trends in the legal market. But what’s needed is a change in the very conception of why somebody would want to enroll in “pre-law studies” without first considering what the law is for.
Because “the law is not there to provide a livelihood for lawyers any more than illness prevails in order to offer a living for doctors,” lawyers shouldn’t perceive their role in Susskind’s anticipated transformation as that of jealous gatekeepers of their monopoly, but as facilitators of access to justice. Since perceptions matter, it’s only in this way that students touring campuses everywhere might start seeing the legal profession with the esteem it could deserve.
Since the legal profession is defined by who’s in it, students who pursue a legal education with motivations of service and public interest are more likely to embody those values as a new generation of lawyers in a transformed field.
Brandin O’Connor attends Osgoode Hall Law School and was 2008-09 president of Queen’s New Democrats.
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