Professional socialization of lawyers The occupational culture of law cannot be reduced to a matter of formal education and training because

the lawyer never simply learns law through the mechanism of formal instruction. The would-be lawyer is initiated into law; his definition of himself as a practitioner, his awareness of the formal and informal hierarchies within the profession, the reference groups he adopts and his sensitivity to the system of sponsorship and patronage within law, do not come to him from his textbooks, although some of the skills for survival may be picked up in articles or pupilage. Law textbooks do, however, play an important part in the professional socialization of lawyers. Instead of recording the contradictions, conflicts and paradoxes in the growth of knowledge, they offer instead only a simple cumulative knowledge. As they become, for the novitiate, a crucial way of seeing. The textbook functions as the depository of the professions establish truths, its articles of faith all safely abstracted from the conflicts and contexts which helped shape them. For the learner, a way of seeing becomes a way of not seeing. Law textbooks serve up a subject matter largely insulated from the social and political milieu which helped to define it. By reifying law in this way it becomes possible to rear the student on the myth of the objective and olympian character of law. By dehumanising law these fictions are preserved. The textbook, classically seen as an aid to understanding functions instead to exclude the world. Professional socialization provides the initiate with a knowledge (tacit or explicit) of the norms and values of the occupational community. Socialization also serves as a source of formal and informal social control within the profession. Clearly, the formal system of education and training for law provide the remit with a certain definition of his professional role. For this reason the legacy, say, legal education as theoretical, ahistorical, pedestrian and encouraging only a narrow cognitive sense of law has to be treated as an integral part of the apparatus of professional socialization. The distinctive features of an insulated professional community like law include its system of language, its life-style and its mythologies. Each of these critical ingredients play a central part in professional socialization. These items are legitimized in a number of ways through an esoteric knowledge, protected by rigid institutionalization, and through reification of legal roles. The knowledge given to initiates is of two kinds: the textbook law, and a more subtle instruction in commonsense knowledge concerning what is appropriate in style, content and purpose of the law. This largely unconscious everyday knowledge of legal practice is the pre-theoretical aspect of the preparation for law (i.e. what everyone knows is proper in law). To this can be called the deliberate attempt to reify, to dehumanize, legal roles by denying that lawyers have any function other than strictly and impartially to administer existing law. Such a denial of the policy making role of lawyers and courts reinforces the myth of the objectivity of law. In this way, professional socialization contributes to the fantasy that the lawyer propagates the work unaffected by the strivings of other men. The mechanisms of professional socialization within law are further supported by two external agencies. First, by the quality of the extra-occupational culture of lawyers, namely the social milieus of the conservative middle and upper middle classes, and by the intimate social contact with associates in other leading professions. The precise significance of such inter-relationships has been explained by one lawyer, as follows. There is also the more general point that the law must largely embody the values of the society in which it operates. Some critics insists that if the law is to be regarded as a social service, especially by the less privileged sections of the community, it must be made to seem less forbidding and less like an instrument of the ruling class. There is something in this. Michael Zander compares the reluctance of working class clients to seek the services of a lawyer with their ready acceptance of the doctor, who is no less middle class in background. This is used as an argument for recruitment lawyers from a wider social range. But what distinguishes law from medicine is its necessary and intimate connection with social structures. As long as British social structure is such that the

traditional ruling class can still command same difference, the law, to be sure of respect, must partake of the style of that class. Until the thought of a high court judge pronouncing of a life sentence in a Birmingham accent no longer seems incongruous, High Court judges must speak with the tones of Oxbridge, and so must ambitious barristers, and so must solicitors who do not wish to be thought inferior to barristers. This situation cannot be changed unilaterally by reform as in the legal profession, including changes in its members education. The second external agency is the needs and demands of the typical regular clientele of lawyers. This aspect of law has received scant attention but there seems little doubt that clients can serve to some extent to socialize those whose services they are hiring. Or at last, it is reasonable to suppose that lawyers and especially initiates will learn those modes of behavior calculated to gain the confidence of the ordinary middle class client. In this way, the lawyer is partly defined by those he is serving and observation readily confirmed in other professions (e.g. medicine and teaching). Evidence that the status of the professional is partly determined by the social status of those he formally serves is provided, among lawyers, by the lower status of those solicitors who specialize in doing criminal advocacy in magistrates courts. Lower, that is, in relation to other practitioners in the solicitors half of the legal profession. The reason being the low social and economic status of the great majority of defendants who appear in these courts. Although, in this limited sense, the poor client can make his mark upon the lawyer, the social background of the lawyers makes it difficult for the lawyer to understand the poor client. As a result, whatever explanations and account lawyers offer concerning the situation and behaviors of such clients they frequently take the form crude stereotyping. The detail of the stereotypes, how finely it is draw, is an index of the social distance that separates the definer and the defined. We are put in mind, at this point, of descriptions of attempts by members of the liberal professions (including law) in the 19th century to regulate problems of the deserving and undeserving poor through the formation of the Charity Organization Society (COS). According to Stedman-Jones: It was in the mid 19th century that the liberal professions were first properly defined, and bean to acquire the trappings of gentility: a process which Kitson Clarke has aptly described as the creation of a new new gentryas members of the liberal professions their new found prestige rest not upon wealth or birth, but upon education and the profession of appropriate professional credentials: even when they possessed independent means, they stressed primarily the value of a professional vocation. This helps to explain the emphasis of the COS upon the indispensable value of expertise and its thesis that charity was a science with its own professional procedures which could not be safely practiced except by those in profession of the requisite skillsBut at the same time, this new urban gentry was perhaps least equipped by experience to comprehend the behaviour of the pooras a group who had attained positions of eminent respectability, not by accident of birth, but through the practice of austere virtues and long years of unrelenting hardwork, they were prone to view the poor, not with the understanding patenilism of the established rich, but with a hard-headed severity born of strong aversion to all those who stood condemned of fecklessness, indolence and lack of resilience. Necessary Reading: Sharma, K.L. 2005. Legal Profession and Society: A Study of Lawyers and their Clients. Indra Deva ed. Sociology of Law. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.