The Bar embodies the structure that the rest of the legal sector is striving to emulate, says Paul Martenstyn
It sometimes seems that the rest of the legal world considers the Bar to be one of those British oddities that, like our unwritten constitution, does not make much sense in the abstract but works rather well in practice. In the same way that we would never found a country today on the basis of an unwritten constitution, it seems unimaginable that we would choose to structure our lawyers this way if given the choice.
This is the basis on which most defences of the Bar are mounted: Yes, it’s a bit odd, a bit old fashioned, but it works, doesn’t it? So why change it?
While I appreciate the sentiment, the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that this defence actually damns the Bar with faint praise. Rather than a quaint relic of the past, it increasingly seems that the Bar offers a glimpse into the future of the law.
