Legal profession must ‘prepare’ for scrutiny

Press, 2 October 1987, Page 4

Legal profession must ‘prepare’ for scrutiny

The legal profession must be prepared to accept increased public accountability, the Prime Minister, Mr Lange, told delegates at the 1987 International Law Conference in Christchurch last evening. “The medical profession seems unable to keep its shortcomings from the public despite its highly structured refinement of the principles of exclusivity. The legal profession is equally open to scrutiny and must prepare itself for forms of review which go further into the domain of public accountability,” said Mr Lange during the opening of the conference at the Christchurch Town hall.

The legal profession would be subjected to “more vehement demands" from consumers for the supervision of standards other than by peer-group review.

“I believe that those demands will be satisfied.

If there is an element of promise in that prediction, it is deliberate. I am not going to hector the country’s schoolteachers about the need for appraisal of their performance and have to tell them that the legal profession is somehow different”

Mr Lange also predicted “some change” in the pattern of employment in the law, especially in the attitudes to the employment and promotion of women. “I do not think that the profession will be able to sustain its discriminatory approach. The time is past for it If the profession itself does not act on it you may be certain that Governments will take it on themselves to intervene.

“I am not attributing any extraordinary feminist impulse to Governments. It is a question of the prevailing political imperative.” The law, Mr Lange told

the conference, betrayed the way most individuals behaved towards one another. It was not at the heart of what motivated individuals but reflected the chosen mode of the behaviour of the majority of people who made up a society. “In my experience, the law has no capacity whatsoever to modify the behaviour of those who do not adhere to the standards of the majority. It is in essence, an instrument for mopping up the dissident”

Legislation in Parliament reflected the best consensus which could be discovered. Parliament could not be expected to make better people by making better laws. Better people would lead to better laws, Mr Lange said. “That can only happen when there is an inculcation of a sense of interdependence, the acceptance of the principle that

your right to be immune from asssault is balanced by your responsibility not to assault others. "Reliance on the law is an illusion. I think that it is impossible to convey to the public the complexity of Government and the limitations on its capabilities. I have little patience with those who offer simple answers in the law or in politics.” The legal profession would face public judgment in a climate "increasingly less tolerant of professional privilege and increasingly demanding of professional performance,” Mr Lange said.

In that climate, the “sacred monopoly” of conveyancing would disappear.

“But the practice of law will not be threatened by that It has, after all, a certain resilience,” he said.