Anyone wanting to be called to the bar must eat 12 formal dinners at the inns of court.
Photograph: Graham Turner
The Inner Temple, one of the four inns of court where wannabe barristers will be dining.
To gain access to most professions, it's enough to sit an exam or two. But the bar is different: qualification as a barrister is contingent on law graduates attending a dozen formal dinners.
May is the height of dining season, as hundreds of hopefuls try to cram in enough meals – held at the four inns of court in London – to enable them to be "called to the bar" upon completion of their studies in June. Take an evening stroll around the Temple area of the capital during the next few weeks and you'll see them: swarms of prospective barrister youth clad in the dining dress code of "dark lounge suit, plain collar and sober tie/white blouse, or "genuine ethnic dress", en route from lectures to load up on subsidised food and booze.
The medieval ritual has its roots in the days when the inns (Inner Temple, Middle Temple, Lincoln's Inn and Gray's Inn) were responsible for vocational legal education. "Sons of country gentleman" from across the country would come to lodge with them, attending lectures, taking part in mock courts and dining together in the inns' main halls. Today barristers' professional training is conducted by private law schools. But the dinners live on.
Bar students' views are mixed. Some, such as James Valori, a student who attended Tuesday's dinner at Lincoln's Inn, see dining as a "welcome break from the tedium of bar school". Others are less keen, suggesting that the dining requirement is an indulgence too far for an upper-class-dominated profession (two-thirds of barristers are privately educated and 82% went to Oxbridge). A student diner who didn't wish to be named commented: "For the profession responsible for upholding justice to compel its new recruits to eat a series of decadent meals sends out the wrong message."
Most agree on one thing: in the extravagantly priced world of legal education, the dinners are a rare example of value for money: for around £16 you get a four-course meal (on Tuesday, Lincoln's Inn served watercress soup, followed by deep-fried mushrooms, grilled chicken breast and rhubarb fool) and as much wine and port as you can drink.
On top of this, there's enough pageantry for a royal wedding: opening and closing processions of gown-clad "benchers" (senior barristers who are members of the inn), a toast to "the Queen, the church and this honourable society" and lots of bowing (but no hand-shaking; barristers are traditionally forbidden from shaking hands with each other). A recent drive to make the dinners more educational by introducing short pre-dinner talks seems to have only mildly diluted the fun.
Best of all are the venues. As a setting for anachronistic banquets, there can be few places to match Lincoln's Inn's Hogwartian "Great Hall" – even if it lacks the claim to fame of the similarly impressive halls of fellow inns Middle Temple and Gray's Inn, which respectively hosted the first ever performances of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Comedy of Errors.
All in all, it makes for quite a show. Probably the nearest thing to it is the formal hall dining ritual of Oxbridge colleges. Although barrister-to-be Tim Johnston, who has done both, reckons the inns of court version is grander. "At Oxford you could get away with turning up in your rugby kit and a gown," he says.
This sense of exclusivity is deceptive, though. While students need straight As to get into Oxford and Cambridge, the only requirement to train as a barrister is a 2.2 degree and a spare £16,000 to cover bar school fees. The proper competition begins after the dinners have been eaten, with around 1,800 bar graduates fighting it out for just 400 traineeships.
A backlog of graduates from previous years means only around one in eight of the students dining at Lincoln's Inn on Tuesday evening will go on to practise as barristers. Most will become solicitors – usually after a stint as a lowly paralegal. Some will end up in related jobs such as legal recruitment or, like me (I trained as a barrister five years ago), in legal journalism.
Not that the poor success rate has done anything to stem the flow of wannabes. Indeed, such has been the demand to join this illustrious profession – given unique constitutional importance by its status as the breeding ground for the judiciary – that the private law schools have created another 300 bar school places since 2003. They have done so despite the number of barrister traineeships falling by over a third during this period, thanks to a squeeze in legal aid funding.
The bar's regulator, the Bar Standards Board, is increasingly concerned about the situation. But its scope for action is limited. An attempt in 2009 to introduce an aptitude test to limit the numbers training as barristers was blocked on competition grounds by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT). And plans formulated in response to bring in a modified version of the test have been put on hold for a year after a pilot met widespread criticism, with many suggesting it wasn't sufficiently challenging to meaningfully reduce numbers. It remains to be seen whether the latest legal aid cuts – which look set to see the number of barrister traineeships fall even further – soften the OFT's stance.
In the meantime, the legal profession's version of Disneyland continues to serve its dinners to anyone who can afford to buy a place at bar school.
©guardian.co.uk
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