Document Type

Article

Disciplines

International Law

Abstract

The English legal professions, and the English legal system generally, hold a perennial fascination for American legal observers, understandably enough considering America's common law roots. Americans often compare their own legal folkways unfavorably to the English way of doing things.1 This is especially true whenever there is widespread dissatisfaction with lawyers and with the legal system in America.2 Less frequently, some aspect of the English system is held up as a cautionary warning to Americans.

Yet, although England is an obvious recourse for legal comparisons, the English legal world is also a "distant mirror" for Americans: remote as well as familiar, a suitably exotic setting for semi-humorous television serials, and a source for the quaint if somewhat hackneyed drawings and prints that are thought to lend professional tone to the otherwise-functional offices of American corporate law firms.

Despite the frequent comparisons, the English legal professions are not well understood in America, if only because an understanding of the English legal world requires a grasp of just how foreign its institutions are to their American counterparts.

The traditional bifurcation of the English legal profession is one thing that is fairly well known to Americans, at least in broad outline. There are actually two professions - barristers and solicitors. Barristers - of whom there are only about 6,600 practicing in all of England" - are primarily advocates, and have monopoly rights to conduct litigation in the higher courts.5 Solicitors, of whom there are 55,000 or so,6 are primarily "office lawyers": for the most part they advise clients, negotiate and draft documents, and prepare cases whose actual trial will be conducted by barristers. (Solicitors and barristers are both entitled to conduct litigation in the lower courts.) Members of the public have direct access only to solicitors: you must go through your solicitor to retain a barrister.

These English professions differ from the American legal profession not only in points of style and etiquette, but in size, social function, and outlook. The legal professions also reflect (and, of course, help to shape) each country's legal system as a whole.

How and why are the American and English legal professions so different? This Article will suggest that there are deep underlying differences in the "non-legal" cultures of England and the United States which account, at least in large part, for the differences in the legal profession. Considered in isolation from their social roots, the English legal professions might seem merely picturesque. But with an understanding of English society and of the English national character, the professions are quite comprehensible, and their workings shed light on what the English have come to expect from their legal system over the years.

Meanwhile, the English legal professions today face an uncertain future. The British government recently proposed, and then enacted in diluted form, a highly-publicized scheme of reform for the professions. Ironically, just as American ideas for legal reform often have a British flavor, many of the ideas underlying the British reforms were implicitly drawn from the American model. It might be thought that the new reforms will quickly narrow the differences between legal practice in America and England. But this article will suggest why the reforms are unlikely, in and of themselves, to have that effect.

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