Stunted Growth in Legal Education: Strategies for Progress

Epilogue

An Ethnographic Tale

From an in-between place to a fresh field.

Actors themselves make everything, including their own frame, their own theories, their own contexts, their own metaphysics, their own ontologies. When they intersect it’s a miracle, and miracles, in case you don’t know, are rare. (Latour, 2004b)

Mid 2005

I travel between the physical and conceptual spaces, carrying my bulging backpack, weighed down by what has already been said. I decide to rest and sit on a low brick wall, under a eucalypt tree at the Grattan Street gateway.

Nearby to where I sit resides the 1888 Post-Graduate Building, with its gracious and human proportions. Its double door and sweeping staircase welcome me to a room where once a month I join fellow post-graduate research students, the ANTs. Once an outsider I am now welcome, and here I learn to be reflexive and to bring discrete fields of knowledge into a meeting place, where the giants on whose shoulders we all clamber become humanlike and via our dialogue we discuss their ideas, our ideas and new ideas. After which I have sufficient sustenance to again return to my journey and add tentative brush strokes to a canvas, under the patient and watchful eye of a master practitioner, my supervisor.

Whilst sitting, I find myself gazing over the busy city road, which splices the campus in two, towards the new law faculty, which is standing tall, heroically modern and physically separated from the body of the university by a tree lined promenade of deciduous trees. There are no gum trees. It is barely identifiable as an Australian architectural landscape, cosmopolitan, stateless. And even the light is somehow more European, reminiscent of the soft smoky haze of London or is that the fog of New York?

A stark frame, a twenty-first century sentinel, heralding a new era for the law faculty stands proudly isolated from the textured period landscape on the other side of the road. Is this a new renaissance building or, more aptly described, as a glass cage?

I sit on the edge, a boundary walker between two disciplines, feeling tired and challenged from my three years of fieldwork. The regular sustenance I seek is located in the fortified academic communities and it is there I can find the vibrant discussion and plates of nibbles which initially give me a good feed.

The ideas and the fare are prepared from recipes that do not sustain my journey and I am forced back out to return again to my fieldwork, away from the walled protection, exposed to the rawness of my line of inquiry – to go, listen, learn, practice, to change my views, to write detailed descriptions of what I harvest. I am on my quest to understand how lawyers learn to both manage and lead in their workplaces.

There is no bridge to conceptually span the two places, law and education, between which I travel. From my mother tongue, the language of law, I have ventured into another discipline, education, and I must work hard on my fitness to traverse them.

The new Law Faculty building has architecturally and philosophically by-passed a century and resolutely transports the law school from the nineteenth to twenty-first century. A resplendent shimmering tower has replaced a humble, crumbling sandstone home. I sense a slight foreboding as its gaze faces the legal precinct of Melbourne, almost within physical reach, reminding legal practitioners of who is in charge of academic legal knowledge and thought leadership. A reconceptualised ‘ivory tower’ but what is it protecting and valuing? Is professional leadership still treasured here or am I witnessing the commercialisation and commodification of law, a shift of allegiance from democratic professionalism to managerial professionalism and the concurrent pre-eminence of operational insight? It soars, a twenty-first century reincarnation of the degree factory. Does it prepare its law students adequately for their professional career destiny where they are destined to become an integrated professional worker, if indeed the faculty accepts this as its brief? I think not.

Despite the promise of a revitalised and divergent discourse heralded by the contemporary, façade there is no perceptible movement beyond the static, clinical structure. Inside, the resplendent library, law’s laboratory, wraps around the floor levels in its transparent skin. I prefer to think of law’s laboratory as also reflective practice.

I fear the faculty has already been colonised by the discourse and interests of professional services and its nemesis, economic instrumentalism, supported by a steely framed allegiance to law’s scientific traditions. Or is it more that others are, thus far, less articulate?

The faculty stands level, eye to eye, with the lush commercial city skyscrapers in which reside the big important law firms, fragmented fiefdoms of private business wealth in fierce competition. Yet even these firms navigate between private and public interests, contributing to the profession and sharing their practical knowledge with the academy. Alongside them preside the justice houses, resplendent in their smooth exterior shells and guarded at their entrances by the state’s police and government law officers, the uneasy jostling of law and the state. Barristers reside in their chambers, ‘nests of fiercely independent sole practitioners’ (A1) who nevertheless retain their open door policy and collegiality.

I attend a post-graduate law students’ presentation in the new building. The banquet of salmon and focaccia seems excessive for a simple lunch-time meeting.

The lecture on privacy laws, from the eminent professor, begins and I am seduced back to my undergraduate law school days to the predictable paradigm of a didactic lecture. Even though the topic involves the leadership role of lawyers, in setting the agenda for protecting citizens’ privacy, there is no discussion of the embodied practitioner. I feel like a stranger in my own profession’s learning place and I do not return for some time for more salmon sandwiches because they give me indigestion. I would rather go hungry and I do. I have been force fed again, yet yearn instead for feed forwarding.

Early 2007

Having travelled through a diversity of terrain I have completed my thesis – like an early Australian pioneer who travels out from the city to an ancient but unforgiving landscape, compellingly beautiful yet cruel. I map and am mapped by diverse and unfamiliar terrain.

In the distance looms a sturdy and ancient gum tree. As I draw nearer I notice how it is intrinsically connected to its landscape, drawing sustenance from the nutrients and sunlight, equipped to withstand changing weather conditions.

It is sure footed, steadfast and secure in its materiality yet yielding to the diverse interests around it, the needs of the birds, insects, and people; thus able to shelter and accommodate many under its broad canopy of leaves.

I sit under my hospitable tree, this time with anticipation, awaiting a few brave travellers to come my way, hoping they can read my map. When they arrive I will offer them my ideas about what is happening in Legal Working Culture and we can share some fruitful dialogue. They may sow and harvest something of interest and go on their way.

If I am patient there could be an intersection and cross fertilisation of ideas and hybrid species will be created out of Legal Working Culture. But I cannot control the climate. I can only nurture the seeds of ideas, protect them as they grow and feel distress if they are trampled on by indifference or territorial warfare.

I wonder whether a seed from my gum tree, could, one day, settle messily into the crusty soil of the orderly promenade and take root. That would indeed be a miracle.

Let the sowing begin.

Dr Deborah Hann 2024