 Rwy'n meddwl doedd weithio i'n gweld ffaith erbyn hynny. Mae gennych rhwng fawr i'r locu wedi cymdeithiliadau sy'n cyllid gyda'r byw. Dda'n ddiwedd, mae'n gwybod beth eisiau. Fi i wneud i'n ddweud cynghoro eich loes hynny, mae'n gwybod bod eich bod gennym a'u beirio. Dwi'r byw ffordd yn gweithio ar gyfer y blaen, mae anodd ddechrau'r cyfu, ychydig. Rydych chi'r ymddir y gallwch ifanc, mewn cyfal hynny wedi bod yn fwybod o'r unithriadau. Mae'r sícy Hyfodiadau Nesaf. Cyfnodd sleif wrth yn ymgyrch yn ychydig. Felly am y mam ynghylch, byddwn ni'n peth o'r parwy ar hyn. Mae'n 어떡 arall ddiwedd yn ddechrau. Mae'r swyddiad yw'r cychwyn allan, byddwn ni'n gwybod am y Cerdde, byddwn ni'n ddechrau yn y cyfnodd mawr yn awr, ac ymuch yma, byddwn ni'n gweithio. Ychwch wedi tyfnodd llawd ar hynny, ac yn hynny oherwydd ein awr. One of the titles, I think, was trial by battle, and the second was trial by fire. I'm not quite sure that's what they do in the Supreme Court. I hope it's a bit more sophisticated, the trial process there. But he will speak for between 15 and 20 minutes, and then we will hear from Professor Virgo, and then we will have questions, and they will each sum up very briefly at the end, and then we will take a vote. Without any interest, we will take just a very rough and ready vote at the moment. Without hearing anything at all, just put your hands up. How many of you believe that those who wish to practice law should not study law at university? How many think they should? And how many don't think? All right, but we'll start with Lord Sampson. Thank you very much. As we have just demonstrated, for many of you here tonight, whatever view emerges from this debate is going to be too late. Some of you, of course, will be reading the part one. Some of you are at school, but I suspect that quite a lot of you have already made up your mind and are committed to reading law. This is after all the law faculty. So one might ask, what am I doing here turning up on a cof, where February evening, in order to address 300 people of some intelligence on the proposition that they've all made a terrible mistake which they can now do nothing about. Professor Virgo, of course, was responsible for designing this evening's debate and he naturally awarded the cushy option to himself. He is going to tell you that you have all been wise, noble and sage enough to make the right policy choice at an early stage and you would be less than human if you were not at least initially to agree with him. The problem, of course, about debates like this one is that they simplify issues and they polarise opinion. The question before you tonight only admits of two answers. One is yes, the other is no. Of course, in real life, the answer is usually neither yes or no, but it all depends. That's not an answer which you have an option of giving at the end of this evening. That applies, of course, with special force to the question whether one should, if one intends to be a practitioner, read law at university. In current conditions, anybody who does not read law at university and intends to practice will, of course, take a year longer to qualify than his contemporaries who did read law at a time when there is virtually no public financial support available for obtaining professional qualifications. Most of you who take that course will have to borrow on top of what you have already borrowed in order to get through university in the first place. I don't, for one moment, underestimate the difficulties that that puts people in. Choosing to read law, if you want to practice it later is a decision that requires some courage, and I make no bones about that at all. The first point that I want to make to you this evening is that you should approach a question like this not as a future practitioner, but, so to speak, as a present philosopher. You should also, I suggest, approach it with at least an element of idealism. The question for you ought not to be. What is the answer that suits me? The question should be, what is the answer that would suit a civilised world, the sort of world in which I would actually like to live? A world perhaps in which student choices were not constrained in quite the same way by the practices of this particular profession or by financial constraints arising from the limitations of the grants budget. Now, this is not, however, a pointless exercise. Actually, the world has a way of catching up with its ideals, but only on condition that it's prepared to acknowledge those ideals in the first place. Now, may I say first of all that I am not suggesting that law is a bad subject to read at university? What I am saying is that it's better to read something else. You should not, in other words, read it as a first degree. Now, I readily accept that reading law at university does have some advantages, and that they may well be compelling advantages to those who do not intend to spend the rest of their life practising it. In most English universities, law is taught in a way that is interesting and extremely skillful. And as a background to the broader disciplines of life, law is valuable in that it conveys something to those who don't intend to practise it of the intellectual method of law, as well as a basic set of legal principles by which important parts of our society is organised. But there are, however, in my view, two reasons why law is the wrong choice of degree for those who intend to practise it. One is that it is bad, I would suggest, for one's personal development to lose the opportunity to study another subject before throwing yourself into the disciplines for professional practice. It is personally impoverishing. The other reason is that it is bad for work, and the reason is that it is bad for one's professional development, because the study of law is not the best preparation for professional legal practice. Now let me say something about the first of those points first. The great intellectual virtues, I would suggest, whatever subject you study, are curiosity and imagination. And these two attributes of the human mind are at their freshest and at their sharpest and most elastic between, let's say, the ages of 15 and 25 before the pedestrian limitations of earning one's living are set in. Some legal practitioners are very good at escaping these limitations, but in my experience most of them aren't. There are obvious reasons for this. The law is a priestly craft. Intellectually it is a relatively enclosed world. For a practitioner advising clients or for that matter addressing judges, except perhaps at the most senior levels of professional practice, the space allowed for speculation is actually very limited. It depends, the study of law, on a finite range of source material. Much of that source material is, of course, devised by other lawyers, these judges. Much of it is statutory and therefore a given, not suitable for amending at any rate by its students. And it also depends on a particular way of thinking which is not shared by most of the population at large. Socialy, too, I find that law is practised in a relatively closed world. The reason is simply the organisation and the pressures of professional life. Criminal practitioners do see plenty of unconventional people, although thieves are actually not quite as varied as you might think. There is a quite limited way of picking pockets. Legal practice involves long hours. Many of them spend in highly congenial company, but generally in the company of people is much like yourself. Like medical practitioners, it is actually quite remarkable how often lawyers marry each other. The law is a wonderful profession in many ways, but it is a profession whose practitioners do need perhaps more than other groups a window on the outside world. In this debate, a great deal is bound to depend on what view you take in general terms about the proper function of a university education. If you regard your time at university as purely a vocational preparation for earning your living later with some quite good social life thrown in, then that is perfectly sensible in that situation for you to read law even if you intend to practise later. If, like the present government, you think that universities exist in order to maximise the growth of the gross national product and for virtually no other purpose at all, then you will probably end up taking the same view. For my part, I reject both of these propositions. However, economic planners may view my function in the universe, I don't regard myself as a mere factor of production and I don't imagine that anyone here does either. I think that the function of a university is to equip people to get the greatest possible intellectual satisfaction out of not just work but life in general. I think that its contribution to what we do with our lives at weekends and after whatever time of night we get home is at least as important as its contribution to our income. I would suggest that a life in which one has been mainly concerned with the same subject from the age of 18 to the age of 65 because it is a good way of earning a living is a seriously impoverished life by comparison with quite a lot of alternatives. If you are not going to practise law then reading it as an undergraduate can be a mind broadening experience and the same is true, the same is not in fact true if the degree is simply going to be the prelude to more of roughly the same thing over a period of some 40 years. If you are going to read law then the opportunity to use the most intellectually formative or if you are going to practise law the opportunity to use the most intellectually formative period of your life studying languages, literature, philosophy, theology or history or whatever is an opportunity that ought not to be missed. The problem is that a single life is not long enough for all the things that one might be curious about in the course of living it. Unfortunately a single life is all that we have. We therefore need a large measure of vicarious experience as well as personal experience and we are not going to get a great deal of that out of the study of law. Law is a very poor way of vicariously experiencing anything whereas the other subjects that I have mentioned and quite a few other subjects that I haven't mentioned are in fact wonderful funds of vicarious experience. Benjamin Disraeli is supposed to have said in the House of Commons we are here for fun and what I am trying to tell you is that having seen a lot of lawyers in my time think that the ones who did something else at university have more fun. Now on that note I want to turn to my second point which is that reading law is not actually the best preparation for practising it. I would accept that there are some advantages in a university degree in law which no other kind of legal education is going to supply in particular a university degree ought to equip students with an overall view of the broad field of legal principle. By comparison most professional training courses have a tendency to treat law as a series of subject specific more or less self-contained islands. I think that practitioners too are far too inclined to look at legal problems too narrowly without regard to any general legal principles principles which they may well find in a subject area that is not within their own speciality. Now the problem about this is that the reason why lawyers behave that way is not I think the way that they studied law at university or in professional courses it's a problem which is associated with the increasing professional specialisation which has been characteristic of both branches of the legal profession for quite a number of years and I'm afraid that it's a tendency which lawyers succumb to regardless of how or where they were trained as lawyers. The truth is that whether you had a university education or a purely professional one in law you actually learn most of your law and almost all of your judgement by practicing on the public. My experience is that non-law graduates are just as good or bad as the case may be at thinking broadly about legal problems as law graduates are everything depends on the intellectual ability of the particular practitioner in question. Now as a general proposition the first requirement for any intellectually demanding profession whether law or something else is a clear and logical mind a generous measure of vicarious experience and in addition I think the ability to string a coherent thought together whether or in writing. Now in principle these are qualities that can be acquired by studying any intellectually demanding discipline and that applies as much to those who intend to be lawyers as to those who intend to practice any other skill. In the end intellectual ability and imagination matter a great deal more than a practitioner's specialised intellectual knowledge. John Paul Getty the famously laconic American oil billionaire was once asked why it was that he employed so many classicists in his business. His answer was they sell more oil. Now one only has to look at the remarkable number of outstanding professional lawyers who did not read law in order to see that Getty's dictum has a far broader application than just the oil industry. In the United States they have never had law available as a first degree. Yet the United States seems to have produced some really quite interesting lawyers over the two centuries of its existence. In England probably the commonest training for lawyers until relatively recently was in fact classics and a list of the greatest English judges just over the past century would I think be revealing. Arguably the greatest English judges of the century we have just had were Lord Denning who read mathematics at university and Lord Bingham who read history. Now they are in very good company. Lord Wrights, Lord Atkin and Lord Wilberforce all read classics. Lord Diplock read chemistry. Lord Mackay read mathematics and physics. The current vice president of the Supreme Court Lord Hope read classics. And the current president of the court Lord Newberger read chemistry before becoming a banker and only as a last resort turning to law. Indeed he recently shocked an audience of German lawyers famously obsessed by formal academic qualifications by saying that he had actually found it quite easy to move from a more rigorous to a less rigorous discipline the real problem was moving in the opposite direction. Now if you look at the well known names among current practitioners the ones that one sees regularly on the newspaper reports Michael Belloff, Michael Mansfield Dino Rose all studied history at university and I hope that this court of catalogue ought to persuade at least quite a lot of you that you can have a reasonably satisfactory legal career without thinking seriously about law until after you leave university. Now I don't think that this is actually an accident. There are quite a number of reasons why one would expect those degrees in subjects other than law to turn out to be rather good professional practitioners. Let me mention just a few. The first is that what you discover when you start practising law is that there is surprisingly little law in it. Of course you do need a good grasp of the basics but that's relatively easy to obtain. Much the most challenging thing about practice of law is understanding and analysing what are often quite complicated facts massive documentary files and that odd combination of memory and prejudice which accounts for the way that human beings behave in the witness box. A remarkably high proportion of cases that come before the courts including the Supreme Court are ostensibly about law but actually about the correct analysis and classification of the facts. The truth is although I hesitate to say this in present company that law is dead easy most of it is common sense with knobs on. What is difficult of the facts? Once you have correctly understood those and stripped away the 95% of the facts that don't matter at all the legal solution is almost always obvious. Now that's one reason why prime requirements for a successful lawyer are an outstanding ability to understand facts often in relatively arcane areas of human life. The number one qualification for doing this is therefore to have the largest possible personal fund of experience most of which will in the nature of things be vicarious. A law degree is not as I have said a way of getting vicarious experience. Degree courses which require a serious analysis of facts and evidence are likely to be a great deal more useful and they include most of the obvious analytical subjects like sciences and mathematics or they include subjects like classics, history, English or foreign language which provide the requisite vicarious experience. Byngham was not only a historian at university but pursued his interest in serious scholarly history throughout his life and this fact I think infused many of his greatest judgments with a humanity and a capacity for observation of the world which is a large part of what made him a great judge and which he would not have obtained by studying law at university he would have had to do something else to acquire those qualities. Now these are qualities that are just as valuable for practitioners as they are for judges like Tom Bingham especially if they intend to practice as advocates. The English legal system is one of the most demanding in the world in terms of the sheer articulate use of language. English narrative judgments have a literary quality which is entirely lacking from the judicial systems of the civil law or from the Court of Justice of the EU or the European Court of Human Rights which are coached in that special robotic brand of Dalek speak that we all know so well. Oral advocacy has a uniquely significant place in the English legal system and in those that are modeled on it. A degree course in law is no more likely to improve your command of language than any other humanities degree and very probably less likely to do so. Now to some extent of course especially in Cambridge you can eat your cake and have it by doing a combined degree. I personally doubt whether many combined degrees will give you the degree of professional or profound understanding of either of the two subjects that you would get by studying just one of them on its own although some combined degrees clearly do. The problem about switching half time after the part one tripos at Cambridge is that in practice if you are going to qualify in law you will usually have to do a fourth year and therefore it will take just as long as it would have done to do a three year course in something else and then go and do the common professional examination. It's also of course true that even those who have read law throughout their lives can catch up later. They can read outside subjects in their spare time, they can learn the foreign languages that they failed to learn at university they can make themselves into universal men or women later in theory. It's surprising how a few people actually do it under the pressures of modern professional life. So the real question to my mind is why just catch up when you can have a serious intellectual grounding in a mind broadening subject that you will not spend your next 40 years studying. Why just catch up when you can study it in the stimulating environment of a great university surrounded by gifted contemporaries pursuing very similar interests. It's an opportunity that will never recur again. So don't lose the chance now. Well we now have Professor Virgo for those who he's not known he is an expert especially in criminal law and equity, an excellent teacher and he's now going to tell you why he's not wasting his life. Thank you. My name is Graham Virgo and I read law at university. I actually read law at this university. I then became a barrister and then I came back to teach law at this university. I want to start first of all by thanking Lord Sumption for coming here and facing the crowds here. I realise it's not easy and particularly having regard to the show of hands at the start particularly those sitting nearer the back in this room it may be like getting turkeys to vote in favour of Christmas. But Lord Sumption has raised a very serious issue. What we do in law schools and why we do it must always be kept under review and it needs to be kept under review nationally as it is at the moment and also locally as well and at the moment in Cambridge this law school is reviewing everything we do in the law syllabus to make sure that we are preparing students properly for those who wish to go into the legal professions for their future legal careers. I ought to emphasise right at the start what this debate is not about bearing in mind the motion. First of all it's not about whether you can or should study another subject at university and then change to study law. We're not talking about whether it's appropriate to do a change over conversion course within a university like Cambridge or the affiliate law degree. This debate is not about whether we should shift to postgraduate legal study as in the United States or as in Australia and it is not even about whether you get adequate preparation for legal practice by doing a one year graduate diploma in law, the conversion course although I am very happy to argue against that as being adequate preparation for legal practice. This motion is simply saying that if you want to be a barrister or a solicitor in this country then you should not study law at university. It will not help you. Lord Sumption last year wrote an article and that has really prompted this debate today and he has summarised in what he has just said some elements of that article. And in that article he emphasised that legal practice is not about law but it is about the facts. It's about the ability to analyse the facts and as we've just heard you can get adequate preparation to analyse facts from studying another subject at university and that will enable you to analyse evidence or to develop pure logical thinking. In other words an undergraduate degree in law is a waste of time for those who wish to enter into legal practice and never mind those of you who've stayed on for postgraduate study during the LLM you are really wasting your time. I have four key arguments I wish to emphasise as to why I do not support this motion. The first is this argument that the law is not just about legal rules but it's about facts and evidence. We would never use this sort of argument about medics. We would never argue that a medic should just do a one year conversion course having studied whatever they like and that one year conversion course will be perfectly adequate preparation for them. If I go and see my GP with a headache I would be rather concerned if my GP said well I didn't do that heads weren't part of the core subject but I can look it up I know how to find the answer but that essentially is the argument against studying law at university. You don't need to know the rules you can look it up. It is all about the facts it's all about the evidence the analogy between a legal practitioner and a GP is a good one Facts are essential but diagnosis is crucial a holistic approach needs to be adopted and to adopt a holistic approach you need understanding and an ability to make connections between all sorts of disparate areas of medical understanding or legal understanding. Now we might say the analogy with medicine is not good law isn't just a matter of life and death like medicine it's far less important I would disagree law is incredibly important that legal profession has an incredibly significant role in this country and frankly it demeans the law and it demeans the legal profession I would say the law is only about assessing the evidence or the facts or even mainly about assessing the evidence and the facts whether you are a judge, a barrister or a solicitor the law is much much more than that. My second argument relates to the legal profession itself Lord assumptions rejection and the relevance of law as an academic discipline plays to an unfortunate stereotype identified by the author Jane Gardam in her brilliant book Old Filth about an old barrister who as a child was told you'll be a lawyer magnificent money sense of logic no imagination but the legal profession of which legal academics form part is much more than that it is a learned profession a great judge once said the legal profession has from times long past been termed a learned profession and rightly so for no man and I will add or woman can properly practice or apply the law who is not learned in that field of law with which he is concerned he must have more than an aptitude and more than a skill he must be learned in a sense importing true scholarship that is right legal scholarship is legitimate scholarship the law is a subject worthy of study and involves rigorous thought despite what Lord Sumption has just said and I know this is a very cheap swipe but Lord Sumption read history at Oxford and maybe he was describing law at Oxford and certainly not here because actually legal I know that was a cheap swipe but legal study requires imagination creativity and deep learning lawyers constitute part of a learned profession and they are more learned if they have studied law first my third argument is something that Lord Sumption touched on and acknowledged it is the access question if we actually move to a system where you are forbidden from studying law at university if you wish to become a practising lawyer that will have profound financial consequences it will require additional study additional expense and at a time when within universities and the legal profession as well we are increasingly concerned about issues of access and diversity that is a very significant argument my fourth argument is what Lord Sumption in his article called general culture the assumption of Lord Sumption is that those entering the legal profession lack an appreciation of general culture and that studying law at university cannot help them acquire that understanding of what he calls general culture but how does the study of classics or languages, maths or even history bridge the gap true it provides an understanding an ability to acquire knowledge relating to an aspect of general culture not only an aspect of it it doesn't cover all aspects of general culture and for those of us who study law and who teach law there are two particular arguments to emphasise first we do culture still we just happen to do it in our spare time we do study languages we do study literature we study history we just don't necessarily do it as part of our legal studies although of course many of us do when you're studying law you are engaging with history and philosophy and languages and all sorts of disparate aspects of general culture the other point about general culture is that actually law is culture or at least it provides the mirror to understand culture Lawrence Rosen in his book entitled conveniently enough law as culture said if one sees law as exclusively concerned with the rules that regulate disputes rather than as a realm in which a society and its members envision themselves and their connections to one another then we will fail to understand how our world is composed the law actually enables you to understand a culture for those of us who study comparative law the law provides a window to understand a foreign culture the law is in fact about facts it's about stories and it's about disputes but in analysing those stories and providing solutions to those disputes we can better understand culture so finally why should you actually study law at university the answer is simple for those who wish to become practising lawyers of course not everybody who studies law does it makes you a better practising lawyer now why well first when you study law at university you acquire legal knowledge but that's the least important part of studying law at a university the law changes and it can always be looked up in a book or on the web at least if you know where to look at how to find it and how to understand it when you found it but the study of law is about so much more than that it's about legal reasoning legal reasoning does not come naturally to most people it requires careful training and the ability to be able to interpret and analyse and studying law at university enables that to occur legal understanding is a crucial part of legal study that requires breadth and depth it requires an engagement with other subjects law is not an island in a stream it interacts with economics, with politics with philosophy all of us who study law all of us who teach law engage with those other disciplines law is about legal criticism practising lawyers need to know what is wrong with the law so that they can predict legal change and they can participate in it as well and finally the study of law is about legal discipline the ability to engage with big questions in a logical way to assess the evidence and to draw rational conclusions this week I have been teaching law students in a variety of different subjects and in those subjects we've been examining issues that require the student to have legal knowledge to develop legal reasoning understanding criticism and essentially develop legal discipline all sorts of disparate legal issues require those different techniques and attributes to be applied to them so finally why did I all those years ago decide to study law when I was in the sixth form I asked all sorts of big questions but probably the biggest question a question which I have often asked ever since is what about law why not study law at university I wanted to understand I wanted to change I wanted to defend and I wanted a subject with real intellectual discipline and I got that but a Lord Sumption I think has made an important point that law schools all around the country need to be aware of something we sometimes forget is that the teaching of law and the study of law might sometimes be regarded as rather dry it is not perceived as I think Lord Sumption said it's not perceived as a fun subject how wrong can Lord Sumption be it is a fun subject there is real excitement and enthusiasm in the study of law now as the lead character said in the greatest film ever made about the law the greatest film and my knowledge of this film shows that I certainly have a very good understanding of general culture the lead character said a very wise professor once quoted Aristotle the law is reason free from passion well no offence to Aristotle but I have come to find that passion is a key ingredient to the study practice of law and of life how true that is it's that sense of passion that led me to study law to practice law to research and write about law and that passion is at the heart of the legal profession and if it's missing it should be there and it's important that all of us ensure that that passion is there law schools are not perfect we in law schools need to think carefully about what we are doing and why we are doing it but in thinking about that there is only one conclusion which is that whilst the study of law at university is not the only preparation to become a legal practitioner it is the best preparation thank you I should have said by the way this debate is conducted according to the queensby rules which means no kicking nothing below the belt no headbutting or anything like that but cheap jibes are permitted now time for you to show some passion that we're told you all have and to ask questions of either of the speakers who's going to go first come on somebody are you in the back do you think that Lord Sumption would have been a better lawyer if he had had a law degree Lord Sumption is an exceptional lawyer without doubt and his career makes that absolutely clear I am sure Lord Sumption would have found it easier to establish himself in the legal profession if he had read law but my argument is certainly not an argument that you should always study law and can only study law if you want to become a legal practitioner Lord Sumption gave us some examples of great judges very great judges who did not study law at university I did not do the same with another list of judges who did study law at university from the supreme court high court because my list would be such a long list I didn't have enough time for it answer might be not if he read law at Oxford but I call that a cheap drive anyone anyone else yes sorry there is a lot to be said some other subject has an unimaginative if you then followed up on a proper academically taught law degree in America and now in Australia and Melbourne and in America you didn't need to do any law at university at all that was the real practice but my argument is that I found a lot of law that was coming there was of course a huge amount of fact that I would be very surprised if people went into the legal profession and didn't discover that there was a very great deal with research people and for those of us who write books like Burma and I've done some myself you know there is a disaster as we're told that actually law is unimportant but it's got all of the facts that would be over time rather than a bit too late so yes I certainly was not suggesting that there is not value if you have done an undergraduate degree in a subject other than law that there is any problem about then reading law at university I think that's a very valuable exercise what I would not agree with her is the suggestion that you actually need to do that to be a successful practitioner the fact is that until really quite recently first of all I entirely agree with what Graham Virgo says about the highly unsatisfactory nature of most professional training courses all one can say is that they were once very very much worse I acquired my first acquaintance with law by going to Gibson and Weldo's Cramers and I was sent by correspondence course little blue books every fortnight or so I would send back the essays to some nameless person who would send them back with marks now I'm not going to suggest that that is a way of acquiring a satisfactory legal knowledge but it wasn't what I was suggesting the fact is that I learnt 100% of my law by practicing and I learnt it pretty quickly and that's not an unusual experience because the truth of the matter is and what's one of the differences between medicine and law doctors of course cannot mug up the necessary medical science and the art of diagnosis in the half hour before a consultation but I have to tell you from long experience that is what I have spent my entire life as a lawyer doing and so has every single practitioner with any experience or success to his name one more question anyone with any questions yes sorry this here yes I agree that you learn something possibly even a lot about a society from the kind of aspects of its existence that's a lawyer's studies I don't agree that there are not in fact better ways of doing it and I think that the habit of legal thinking which legal treatment is a very important and I think that which legal training and I'm not only talking about universities here tends to inculcate is one which tends to inhibit curiosity and produces an attitude to the outside world that is not consistent with the view you just expressed I will tell you a story that represents a very extreme example I was for a number of years a history fellow at Mordlin College Oxford and one of the most distinguished lawyers at Mordlin was John Morris the editor of Dysian Morris on the Conflict of Laws my clearest recollection of John Morris is of entering lunchroom one day it was the day after Odin had been buried at his country house in Austria at Kirchstetten and I entered the room just in time to hear him saying to the wrapped assembly of lawyers you always had lunch I've never been to Kirchstetten and I've never had the slightest desire to go which I do now so that I can dance on Odin's grave Each speaker can now have two minutes just to respond and sum up and Graham if you go first Actually I'm first going to say because many of you will not know that one of the speakers who commented was Professor Sir Roy Good who a number of you will have read his books so I'm very sorry for what I said about Oxford I did myself study there for one year as well I simply want to emphasise what the motion is the motion is saying that if you want to go into legal practice you must not study law it is a waste of time of course you can study other subjects of course you can learn a great deal from those other subjects but really what I wanted to say before and I want to emphasise again is that despite all the misconceptions about the study of law at university and there are many misconceptions it is a subject that is deep it's intellectual it is learned the law profession is a learned profession and the best way to go into that profession is with a good grounding in legal education which you can only acquire by rigorous legal study well I will make just three points the first is I did not say and it is not part of my argument that reading law at university is a waste of time nor do I think so what I have suggested is that there are other better and more mind enlarging ways of acquiring the kind of grasp of reasoning which a lawyer requires the second point is this when I said in the course of my opening observations that the law is an enclosed world I could not have expected to find that view so rapidly confirmed as it was when Graham Virgo was delivering his own arguments the idea that law is supremely important more important than any other subject that it is absolutely vital to an understanding of the world all of these are sentiments that you often hear uttered but only by lawyers it's unique in that respect there are people who have never studied philosophy who admire philosophers there are people who have never studied history that admire historians lawyers are a unique breed in that they have a propensity which is really quite remarkable for acting as their own cheerleaders the third point is simply this that anybody who is going to suggest that without the kind of legal scholarship that is best acquired at universities you cannot be a successful practitioner or an outstanding judge is first of all saying that there were no outstanding judges in England before the end of the 19th century when the first generation of judges went to the bench who had been to had studied law in universities which has an organised degree has really only existed since the middle of the 19th century he also has the heavy burden of explaining why it is that so many not only distinguished lawyers but of our most distinguished lawyers have in fact managed to master legal scholarship without having a law degree I don't deny the value of legal scholarship I do deny that going to learn it at university is the only way of acquiring it well I hope you agree a very stimulating debate now you get your chance to confirm your prejudices again you can of course vote compatibly with law assumptions views even if you're reading law as long as you undertake now not to practice in the future because that's consistent I think with his position but all those who all those who think that those who wish to practice law should not study law at university put your hands up all those who think otherwise put your hands up so I think it's victory for the home team that perhaps that was to be expected how many people would have risked to change their minds change their minds we need to know which way for how many people felt they changed their minds in the course of it very good well there we are that's open minded people we have here thanks very much for coming faculty I'd like to thank Lord Sumpson and Gwen Vergo for this evening and I would like to thank all of you for coming and making this the occasion it has been a great evening for us and the faculty and I would encourage you please if you can to stay this reception on two of the floors outside so do stay and talk we've got a great mix of people here from sixth formers through to very senior practitioners and legal academics as well so it would be great to continue this discussion for a while longer thank you