A blupete Essay

Notes, to blupete's Essay
"An Essay On Lawyers"

1 Autobiography of Edward Gibbon (Oxford University Press, nd), pp. 88-9.

2 The process, a life process which most people follow unknowingly, is essentially one of learning and growing, of submitting our expectations to the test of experience. Our necessary speculations are based on our experiences and our work is to control and correct these speculations. (For further discussion see my page on Sir Karl Popper.)

3 From Birrell's essay, "A Good Book and a Bad One," as found in Selected Essays (London: Nelson, 1908) at p. 301.

4 Law was, and I believe still is, a profession which is learned by rubbing up against those who are in the profession. Articles of Clerkship were required to be completed over the course, in times past, of years. The aspiring lawyer, like any apprentice, learned from his master. It was a way for an older lawyer to get some inexpensive help (not much at first) and for the student to get the necessary real exposure to the practice of law. When it was felt the student was ready, he would go and write his bar admission exams. These bar admission exams really don't make much sense, in that the student presumably had gone through all of that at the law school; but they are still written. Indeed, now we have bar admission school which takes the clerk away from his firm for a period of weeks, maybe months. The time, in my view, would be better spent hauling his principal's court bags around. Some of these young lawyers are let loose to cut their teeth on the poor unsuspecting public with but the barest of experience. Oh! They are all smart; and, they learn. But their first hundred clients, or so, simply get short changed unless they are working in strict conjunction with an experienced lawyer.

5 Jeffrey Hart's introduction to Burke's "On Conciliation with the American Colonies" (Chicago: Gateway, 1964) pp. 24-5.

6 Macaulay, "The Task of the Modern Historian."

7 Ibid.

8 People and Books; (London: Hodder & Stoughton, nd) p. 136.

9 The Wealth of Nations (1776), Bk. 1, Ch. 10.

10 Knights Templars, or Knights or Poor Soldiers of the Temple, were members of a military and religious order, consisting of knights. This royal order was founded c.1118, "chiefly for the protection of the Holy Sepulchre and of Christian pilgrims visiting the Holy Land: so called from their occupation of a building on or contiguous to the site of the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem. They were suppressed in 1312." (OED.)

11 These are physical places, the Inns of Court; and, a delightful day or two can be had just roaming around the "campuses" of these inns. It is, in my view, one of the top things to do when in London.

12 "The Inns of Court in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I filled the Christmas vacations with feasting and revelry, sometimes beginning as early as All Hallowe'en and continuing as late as Shrovetide. Masques and revels were devised and acted by young barristers and law students, and plays were performed in Hall by professional actors." [O. Hood Phillips, Shakespeare and the Lawyers, (London: Methuen & CO., 1972) at p. 23.] It is at the Inns of court that Shakespeare got his start: not as lawyer, though it is speculated that he did receive legal training, but as a playwright.

13 From Conrad's, "A Personal Record," (New York: Doubleday, 1920) p. 16.

14 Oliver Wendell Holms, The Professor at the Breakfast Table.

15 Dobson, A Bookman's Budget (Oxford University Press, 1917) pp. 47-8.

16 William L. Prosser, 1 Jl. Leg. Educ. 260.

17 John Marshall Gest, The Lawyers in Literature (Boston: The Boston Book Co., 1913) at p. 62.

18 Gest, The Lawyers in Literature, op. cit., at p. 135.


GO TO
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Found this material Helpful?


[Essays, First Series]
[Essays, Second Series]
[Essays, Third Series]
[Essays, Fourth Series]
[Subject Index]
[Home]
Peter Landry

2011 (2019)