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Paris : 20 years on (1988)[1]
Sunday morning was grey and drizzly, the kind of weather which would have sent Maigret rushing into the nearest bar for a breakfast calvados.
I wandered into the rectangular courtyard of the Sorbonne and my mind turned back 20 years to the spring of 1968. With an unerring ability to be in the right place at the wrong time, I had visited Paris and the Sorbonne in April 1968. The university buildings were quiet and deserted then, with no apparent indication of the events which were to occur the following month. Now, I could not see any students, but assumed that, like present day British students, they would mostly be smartly dressed. Nor could I see any graffiti urging revolution, nor any defaced electoral posters publicising the Aryan Jean-Marie Le Pen. (In parts of Provence , spray painters have, changed his name to “Le Penis” and “Le Penaud.”)
Most of the cobbled streets around the Boulevard St Michel, which had produced the ammunition to be used against the CRS, had been covered in tarmac. Nor were there many policiers in evidence, apart from four gendarmes who were questioning and searching an Algerian man who had been sitting in a doorway, drinking a bottle of beer. Not even any sign of cars being wheel-clamped.
So, Paris was calm and peaceful and les evenements of May 1968 seemed to have had little outward effect on the quartier latin. As I sat in a café sipping a glass of citron presse, I asked myself what effect the post-68 generation had had on the legal profession and the provision of legal services in Britain . Having re-read Justice for All, the Society of Labour Lawyers’ report, which was first published in December 1968, the answer is “probably not very much”. Justice for All called for a national network of “local legal centres” with salaried solicitors in all cities.
There is undoubtedly a far greater awareness now among the public about legal remedies. Many battered women know about injunctions. Many people who are arrested know that they should say nothing until they have seen their brief, but the legal profession has not adapted sufficiently to meet this greater awareness.
Since 1968, the law centre movement has grown from nothing to a national, albeit patchy, network, but the potential of such a publicly funded service has not been fully realised. Existing law centres are too few in number and many face closure. There are other problems too, although not all criticisms are justified. Self-servicing, particularly in an age of word processors is not necessarily inefficient. Group work, for example on behalf of tenants’ associations, is often far more effective than taking many unconnected individual cases. Other criticisms of law centres, often those made less frequently, are more relevant. Their decision making process, with frequent and long staff meetings, is draining and divisive. Some long serving members of staff are now stale and no longer provide any real input into the centres’ work.
In comparison, the lack of impact of those left-wing, progressive, radical or even liberal solicitors, who now work in private practice is often ignored. Most work in London , where potential clients at least have some choice. In provincial cities, there is often no more than one small isolated firm. Even in London , the once idealistic post-68 generation is fragmented into many small firms with two, three, or four partners. The economics of scale mean that the real and immediate problem of the increasing overdraft, and the impossibility of finding good staff to work for the salary on offer, are more worrying than the standard of the services provided to the public. A national legal service is no longer remotely on the agenda. Solicitors are on the defensive about the Legal Aid Bill, but still seem to concentrate more on the effect the Bill will have on remuneration, than the decline in the quality of services to the public which will follow.
Paradoxically, the Law society appears to adopt more radical stances every week, but then a cynic would say that the Law Society has always been twenty years behind the times. Is the Law Society now approaching May 1968? Is the only hope left the construction of barricades in
Chancery Lane, or even on the streets of Redditch ?
On Monday I went to the Palais de Justice, a neo-classical building with clearly marked stair cases, wide straight corridors and even plans showing the location of particular courts. The contrast to the Kafka-esque Gothic of the royal Courts of Justice in London is very marked.
I particularly covet the robes worn by French avocats – no wigs, but long black gowns which are not open at the front and which they presumably put on over their heads. They look similar to the robes worn by judges in LA Law, but much classier. Men and women wear long white bands, although one particularly suave avocat was wearing a blue bow tie over the top. The main advantage must be that they can wear whatever they like under their robes, like one former English circuit judge who was rumoured to wear an old sweater he wore for gardening under his robes. Some women avocats wear trousers. Last time I was in Paris , I saw one with red flares poking out under her robes.
The French style of advocacy is very different. My 1888 edition of Baedeker says, rather xenophobically “In eloquence [French avocats] are unsurpassed, though the soundness of their reasoning may sometimes be questioned.” The one guilty plea which I listened to was an impassioned plea to the emotions of the court, with the avocat begging and pleading that her client should not be sent away. I hate to think what the reaction of a London stipe would have been.
The courts seemed to rush through criminal cases at a speed which would be unseemly in Britain . I heard a manslaughter case in which a Paris bus driver was accused of killing a woman by driving the bus while her foot was caught in an automatic door. The driver’s evidence in chief, delivered with much waving of arms, and at a rate which must have left the shorthand writer breathless, was over in twenty minutes. The whole case lasted for less than an afternoon.
[1] Published in the Law Society’s Gazette, 29 June 1988
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