It is “regrettable” that “would-be lawyers devote themselves to the study of law from the age of eighteen”, Lord Sumption, Justice of the Supreme Court, has said.
While acknowledging that financial pressures prevented students from taking two degrees, Lord Sumption, an academic historian and author of The Hundred Years War, said studying law was “not a particularly good training for the handling of evidence, or for acute social observation, or for the exercise of analytical judgments about facts, all of them essential judicial skills”.
In a lecture to judges from the Administrative Appeals Chamber and Immigration and Asylum Chamber, last week, Lord Sumption extolled the values of historical knowledge.
Case-law on the subject of British military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, an issue considered during the past year by the Supreme Court, is “like a precis of the history of British foreign policy over four centuries”, he said.
