Book Review

David Lemmings's essay on eighteenth-century English barristers and their culture represents still another depiction of the professions as they emerged about three centuries ago. On the face of it, this is a straightforward account of those legal practitioners, who called themselves "professors of the law." The focus here is on those who were fully engaged in advocacy and pleading, such as litigation and counseling and conveyancing.	1
The factual data that Lemmings has compiled surrounding barristers is impressive and constitutes the body of this work. A chapter on their "Numbers and Prospects" describes the depressed state of their profession--one characterized by a recession in the number of entrants into the inns of court and a decline in litigation necessary to sustain them. In "Gentlemen Bred to the Law" the emphasis falls on other career determinants no less inhibiting. That legal learning was perceived as "a dry and disgusting study"--a contention supported by contemporary testimony--reenforced the notion that the law was a dubious choice. Certainly the inns of court, which offered the "course," or curriculum, were in a dismal state. The chapter on "Practice at the Centre: Westminster Hall and Its Satellites"--"starting out" and the vicissitudes of "launching a practice," laboring at Westminster ("the centre of the legal universe"), distribution of work there (with detailed charts to articulate the facts), and barristers' earnings (backed with more charts) is enormously informative. "Practice at the Margins," an account briefer than that about Westminster, treats barristers at Old Bailey and the bars in Ireland and the American Colonies. This examination is enhanced by the author's interspersing biographical sketches of lawyers here and elsewhere in this work. That American lawyers rendered significant service to their colonial society and body politic marked them in sharp contrast to their less civic-minded English counterparts. Finally, in his last substantive chapter, "Advancement and Independence," Lemmings considers lawyers in government and how such roles evolved. Secular lawyers had, of course, by Tudor times assumed state positions previously occupied by clerics; from the seventeenth century barristers usually prevailed as Crown counsel. After the Restoration barristers' pretensions became strikingly elitist, depending increasingly on aristocratic patronage and connections for career advancement. This elitist image reflected how the bar, the courts of law, and, indeed, the common law came to be viewed in Hanoverian times. Lemmings's detailed charts on career patterns and anecdotal references to Georgian barristers nicely buttress his factual narrative. These chapters dispel any notion that Lemmings subscribes to either romantic theories of common law origins or a worrisome kind of E. P. Thompson treatment preoccupied with the law's criminalizing implications. They do lead to compelling conclusions.	2
Lemmings's eighteenth-century bar operated in a very restrictive environment. Litigation had all but dried up compared to what it had been in Tudor and early Stuart times. The inns of court had lost their vitality as well as enrollment (Lemmings covers this in Gentlemen and Barristers, to which the present work is sequel). The universities despite the reformist Blackstone did not take up the slack. One reason, it seems, for the decline of litigation is that barristers catered to an elitist clientele of aristocrats and the Crown rather than the less affluent.	3
Lemmings's treatment of barrister culture is one of the notable strengths of this book: the badge of the eighteenth-century bar became one of politeness and gentility. Yet this self-image was at great variance with the public perception, one of a parasitic profession given to charging exorbitant fees and inflicting unwarranted delays in reaching decisions. Dickens, of course, captured this aura in Bleak House; Chancellor Eldon embodied it in reality.	4
Lemmings lays out a delicious paradox: as eighteenth-century barristers supposedly became more professional, they energetically pursued patronage from their social uppers and lost touch with their everyman base. This huge disconnect between the profession and the commercial society in which it operated allowed a plodding Parliament to fill the vacuum. Eventually, Parliament took up the matter of reform, albeit at a seemingly snail's pace. In such a manner Lemmings accounts for the decline of the eighteenth-century bar, relegating it to the domain of Old Corruption and calling it a "parasitic appendage of the governing aristocratic culture" (7). It is, indeed, ironic that the "rise of the professions," normally identified with modern society, was in England represented by a bar that identified with the old order, a stultifying nobility and Crown.	5
There is much here to ponder, for Lemmings's conclusions are indeed remarkable ones. The charts in the book are masterful, the appendices useful and even fun to read; the bibliography a gold mine; and the index extraordinarily serviceable. What more is to be said? One very slight demur: the author might better have distinguished the respective roles of barristers and attorneys and denoted some of the consequences for the latter as well as the former. Of course, this is a work about barristers, not attorneys; yet the two were so intertwined during the early part of the period under consideration that a better account of their evolving separation seems justified. In summary, this is an excellent work, immensely important for what it tells about lawyers and their culture and how both related to their society. It is an apt model for all who follow the evolution of the professions in modern society.	6
Albert J. Schmidt Quinnipiac University School of Law and The George Washington University

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