man’s enjoyment of the things he had acquired were protected by the state.32 Holland spent much time discussing legal rights, but very little discussing violations of rights. His vision was far from the duty-centred one favoured by the earlier utilitarian jurists: This was to say that the notion of rights came first, enforced initially by the community in its own way; and subsequently by the mechanisms of the state as it gained strength. It is not surprising that English law was so untheoretical for most of the nineteenth century. To begin with, it must be recalled that legal education was in a sorry state for much of this period.There was no education offered by the Inns of Court until the mid-century, when (in1852) a Council of Legal Education was set up by them. Not until 1872 did examinations become compulsory for aspiring barristers, the ‘higher’ branch of the profession.34 There were readers appointed by the Inns of Court who had lectured to men seeking to go to the bar before; but Henry Maine’s would be the only name of an eminent jurist to figure among their number. By 1850, it was evident to many lawyers that something needed to be done to reform legal education; but its reform continued to be hamstrung by the tussel between the traditionally-minded practitioners, who felt that law was a practical subject which needed to be learned in the chambers of a practitioner; and the theoretically-minded jurists, who wanted it to be a university-based system. Those, like Maine, who fell in the latter camp, looked with envy on German legal education and wished to emulate it in England; but the chances of them achieving this were infinitessimally small.35 m i cha e l lob ban 143 32 Holland, Elements of Jurisprudence, p. 140. 33 Ibid. p. 241. 34 Raymond Cocks, Foundations of the Modern Bar (London, 1983), p. 177. 35 On mid-century legal education, see W.W. Pue, ‘Guild Training vs. Professional Education: the Committee on Legal Education and the Law Department of Que- “The object of a developed system of law is the conservation, whether by means of the tribunals or of permitted self-help, of the rights which it recognises as existing. So long as all goes well, the action of the law is dormant.When the balance of justice is disturbed by wrong-doing,or even by the threat of it, the law intervenes to restore, as far as possible, the status quo ante.‘The judge,’ says Aristotle, ‘equalises’.”33 II
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