Wits lays down the law: Let the graduate beware

Don't get me wrong; some of my best friends really are lawyers (or at least they were until this gets published).

Here's a lawyer story I read a while ago that may or may not be true.

A doctor is being quizzed in a courtroom by an attorney.

Lawyer: "Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?"

Doctor: "No."

"Did you check that the deceased was breathing?"

"No."

"So is it possible that the deceased might have been alive when you began the autopsy?"

"No."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because his brain was in a bottle on my desk."

"But is there a chance that he could have still been alive nevertheless?"

"Well, I suppose it's possible that he could have been walking around practising law somewhere."

I'm not sure that retelling will make me any new lawyer best friends, but it does speak to a prevailing perception of the legal fraternity: that they're not the most emotionally intelligent bunch of people (a bit like Sharks' tight forwards) and that they inhabit an arcane juristic universe that bears little resemblance to reality as experienced by the rest of us.

Last week reports to the effect that Wits University was scrapping its four-year undergraduate LLB degree were just too much grist to any half-awake columnist's mill to ignore. To paraphrase Gore Vidal, one should never pass up the opportunity to have sex, appear on television or take the mickey out of lawyers.

Wits announced it had decided to ditch the system, introduced in 1997, in terms of which students don't have to do a regular BA or other degree before embarking on postgraduate legal studies.

Business Day quoted an unnamed legal academic at another university as saying Wits was doing the right thing because all that the four-year LLB degree had achieved was to produce "legal barbarians". Oh, how some of us laughed.

Making the announcement that, in future would-be lawyers would have to first do courses in classical Greek or speech and drama or some such, the head of Wits' law school, Professor Vinodh Jaichand could hardly have been expected to admit that many of the hundreds of fast-track lawyers produced by his faculty over the past 15 or so years were knuckle-dragging social misfits with heads filled with nothing but a knowledge of Latin and legal hocus-pocus. But he did imply the current degree produced "legal technicians" who didn't necessarily understand "their social function and duty".

The best bit about the reported interview with Jaichand was his statement that Wits' postgraduate legal studies would include courses in ethics.

"A course in ethics will assist future lawyers to make the right decision in morally complex issues. This is an issue of governance in our country today."

You don't say, Prof.

Law, we all know, is big business these days, even if it is a sphere of human endeavour that adds little in the way of social, intellectual or moral advancement, one that, at best, can be described as a necessary evil, a grudge purchase that is necessary to curb the excesses of bad people, bad people and bad politicians (yes, I know that's tautology).

Wits deserves to be applauded for their efforts to instil a drop of the milk of human kindness into a profession associated with bloodsuckers.

My apologies to readers in Durban and thereabouts for referring to members of their rugby franchise in the same breath that I'm banging on about the legal fraternity - but you know what they say about lawyers and sharks.