Pericles was a Plumber: Towards Resolving the 'Vocational' and 'Liberal' Dichotomy in Legal Education

Abstract

Professor William Twining famously represented competing objectives of legal education as a tension between polar images of the lawyer as 'Pericles' or 'the plumber'. Reference to Pericles, an Athenian statesman who presided over a Golden Age, evokes the image of the lawyer as 'the law-giver, the enlightened policy-maker, the wise judge'. Against this sits the image of the lawyer as a plumber - one who has mastered a category of specialised knowledge ('the law') and certain technical skills. Twining decried recourse to rigid dichotomies between 'education' and 'training'; 'academic' and 'practical'; 'theory' and 'practice'; 'liberal' and 'vocational'; and 'law' and 'other disciplines'. He called for rappraochement, and this beyond any 'uneasy patched-up affair'. This paper argues that 'Pericles [though not the historical figure] was a plumber'. The missing link between these two images of 'the lawyer' is the dimension of time. Within that dimension, one might begin to notice the significance of developmental stages and life experience. When this is recognised, legal education becomes concerned not so much with teaching students 'to be' Pericles, nor a plumber - nor for that matter any hybrid creature - but rather with providing a secure foundation of knowledge from which these various things might become possible. In other words, legal education is but one common and discrete stage towards realising technical legal proficiency which, in turn, becomes a necessary stage for potential transformation into an 'enlightened policy-maker' or 'wise judge'. In pursuing this argument, the paper uses as a case-study the life of a judge who arguably most closely resembles a modern, Australian Pericles. Sir Owen Dixon was a justice of the High Court of Australia (1929-1964; Chief Justice from 1952). Many contemporaries considered Dixon to be 'the greatest judicial lawyer in the English-speaking world'. He also combined roles as a diplomat and mediator on the international stage. Yet all of this was underpinned by his marked proficiency in exercising doctrinal knowledge and 'high technique', and an earlier university education directed towards grasping core legal principles and the classics.