My contribution to this collection of essays will be slightly different from that of my co-writers. Rather than drawing your attention to the technical, political and social composition of my legal workspace, I want to instead focus on an important element in every lawyer’s training which arguably prefigures the typical legal worker and legal practice - the ideology and socialisation of law students in law school. Part of what I want to do in this piece is to offer my reflections on how and what I was taught about law, and the disparity between liberal ideas of law and how legal practice invites more critical reflections on the law. The idea is that these reflections help explain how legal education and conventional understandings of legal practice produce particular kinds of ‘disinterested’ legal workers and legal workspaces. As Duncan Kennedy writes, ‘Legal education structures the pool of prospective lawyers so that their hierarchical organization seems inevitable, and trains them in detail to look and think and act just like all the other lawyers in the system.’¹:

A legal education: ideology and prohibitive costs

In order to prime students to become ‘disinterested’ lawyers who administer and revere this system that they otherwise may critique, legal education is crucial. In Britain today, that education is usually delivered in the form of a law degree followed by a professional course. More recently for solicitors, there is the standardised Solicitors Qualifying Examinations. There are other routes to qualification, but as the main ones, I will focus on these below.

After realising I wanted to do law, I investigated how I would get there. In 2018, the Solicitors Regulation Authority was threatening to standardise the exams, but the principal route was still to get a Law degree (or one-year Law conversion for existing graduates), then a professional qualification, followed by a two-year ‘training contract’ in a firm. This route involved huge costs: the two years of study cost a minimum of around £20,000. Funding options for these years were limited. You might be able to cover one year through Student Finance if you meet certain conditions. However, for the other year, you had to self-fund or find an employer willing to spend £10,000+ to help you finish your qualifications. If you do a Law undergraduate degree, you may be able to ride through to the training contract on student debt alone - but this is likely to total around £37,000 minimum since student fees were introduced.

Predictably, those law firms willing to cover some of the fees tend to be the bigger private firms that represent capitalists and the state. Even students who have wealthier families can find it difficult to complete a legal education without the patronage of one of these firms, and so there is an immediate draw to certain types of law. On university campuses, top firms advertise their training contracts with merchandising, taking up stalls at Freshers Fairs and collaborating with institutions to advertise themselves. Often, there are opportunities to do some ‘pro bono’ (‘for the public good’) work while studying, such as by giving free phone advice on benefits or family law. Other than this, and perhaps understandably given the material barriers, students are generally steered towards established firms that can provide training contracts, better salaries, and funding for further study.

I finally saved enough to start the law conversion course in 2021. Straight away, the ideological nature of the course shone through. There were no modules teaching immigration law, housing law, consumer credit law, welfare rights, employment rights, or community care - areas of law which are the bread and butter for social welfare lawyers. There was no room for critique of the system. Insofar as a legal theory is taught, it is the one that the Marxist jurisprude Evgeny Pashukanis critiques: the idea that the rule of law sits above material relations and law is itself derived from originally divine justice and now a moral framework derived from a secular ethics of fairness, reasonableness, and democratic will. I wasn’t alone in feeling this way about the course. However, during my studies, some recommended The Critical Legal Pocketbook, which ;puncture[s] the dull technicality, conservative dogma, and pervasive neoliberalism of legal education’, and it offered some relief during a difficult year.²

After finishing the law conversion course, I looked at my options. There was no funding available for the next stage known as the Legal Practice Course (LPC). I was working now for a small legal charity who lacked the means to pay for the course without external funding. Funding for charities and non-profit law firms has been forcibly limited by successive legislation cutting legal aid over the last 4 decades. In the meantime, the Solicitors Regulation Authority, seemingly without thought to those of us in this position, declared their intention to end the LPC in a few years’ time - not long enough for me to save to complete it. Instead, I had to start again and take the new route to qualification via the newly established Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE).

The SQE is an exam made for the 21st century. A plethora of course providers compete for students’ attention (and money), bragging about their exam pass rates and trying to undercut one another on fees by reducing overheads, like paying for classrooms or teaching. Despite the competition, the most thorough courses still cost thousands of pounds. The exams alone are extremely expensive - £4,000 for both halves - and there are no refunds or discounts on retakes. The delivery of the exams so far has been fraught with embarrassing errors,³ and the ethnic disparity in outcomes is horrifying; this year, you were 30% less likely to pass if you were Black and 18% less likely to pass if you were Asian than if you were white.⁴ I wonder how much the (lack of) funding arrangements contribute to poorer students choosing shorter, cheaper courses, attempting to take the exams without accessing courses at all, or studying alongside challenging full-time jobs, and how this interacts with existing barriers facing people of colour.

After my fourth year working in law, I managed to obtain funding intended for social welfare lawyers to take the SQE. The course I took was administered wholly online through videos and a textbook, with no chance to meet the hundreds of other students also enrolled. There was no room for any discussion and you could tell it was designed to maximise profit. You were supposed to memorise and regurgitate endless legal rules and exceptions, applying them to made-up, decontextualised scenarios and selecting the best of five answers in a multiple-choice question format. It was recently reported that an AI bot successfully passed the SQE1 with a pass rate considerably above the average.⁵ I don’t think that’s a mark of the AI’s intelligence. Essentially, the SQE1 is probably better suited to testing a large language model than a human being. SQE2, the second half of the new qualification, is more skills-based, but the law that is examined is still tailored to the interests of capital. My first practice question on the SQE2 course was to give some landlords advice on minimising their inheritance tax burden.

Law courses are not just ideological in their content, but ideological work is done in the pedagogy itself. The core content on these courses is all current. As law changes, it is replaced on the syllabus and the law that existed before is disregarded. The societal changes and battles fought to change the law are obscured by the present tense. The questions have ‘right or wrong’ answers based on existing precedent, and creativity is discouraged. The law is just the way it is, and its current state is presumed to be the result of a gradual process of advancement in which old judgments are replaced by new cases which help update and improve the law. Legal outcomes are abstracted from their real source in material relations, and from the battles between parties - and between classes - that brought us to the current state of things.

Pay inequality

I had made the decision to start a career in the legal profession around 6 years ago. Even the use of the word ‘career’ speaks to something particular about law. Rather than simply getting a ‘job’, many people enter law with a vision in mind for a long-term future in the sector. Many careers, like medicine and academia, are in a visible process of proletarianisation, revealed partly by recent strike action. The legal sector has largely not engaged in strikes, and parts of the legal industry still offer enormous, six-figure starting salaries. There is a clear path for career progression. After 4 and 8 years of post-qualification experience, rates go up as standard, and many people become supervisors or ‘partners’ in their firms, or set up businesses themselves. There is no shortage of work in a country with an increasingly labyrinthine justice system and hundreds of years of ‘good’ case law (read: judge-made law that has never been cleared away by a revolutionary moment).

What isn’t often discussed with people outside the sector is how extreme the pay inequality is between different firms and types of law. Typically, lawyers who represent capital and/or the state rake it in from early on in their careers. On the other side, lawyers who represent low-income people will stay on relatively modest salaries, no matter how ‘high up’ they can progress. For example, whereas the Magic Circle (top 5) firms now pay newly qualified solicitors at least £125,000 as a starter salary,⁶ a ‘Head of Legal Practice’ at a Law Centre in Wandsworth, London - a position with serious legal and managerial responsibilities - was at the time of writing this piece being advertised for ‘up to £43,000.’⁷ This means that the salary would be lower than the average salary across all industries and grades in the borough (in February 2024, this stood at £43,020 according to PAYE real-time info gathered by the ONS).⁸ These are the ‘fat-cat Legal Aid lawyers’ that the media and politicians can demonise due to a generalised lack of understanding of law as a deeply uneven sector.

This is not a sob story on behalf of social welfare lawyers. There are the wages of prestige too, and it’s not difficult for experienced lawyers to jump into jobs in other sectors, such as policy, consultancy, and politics. It is also possible (and common) to ‘switch sides’ into the more lucrative part of the sector, often doing directly oppositional work to that which you might have done as a social welfare lawyer. For example, tenant-side lawyers often move into Councils and landlord representation. Sir Keir Starmer gets kudos from his time as a ‘human rights’ lawyer, for example, in his work defending Greenpeace in a case against McDonald’s, pro bono.⁹ However, his time at the Crown Prosecution Service cracking down on the 2011 rioters appears to have been more formative.

The pay disparity can tell us something important about law as a profession. Put bluntly, those who represent the powerful can expect their (un)just reward from the systems they help to uphold.

Two visions of the legal system

The way the legal system is taught at law school is riddled with assumptions about the role of law in a liberal democracy. The high-minded theory is that laws are created by the expression of the popular will through the democratic system, and then applied fairly through the courts. The theory promises that the state will only interfere with people’s freedoms by popular consent. The ‘checks and balances’ in the system, such as the ‘separation of powers’ between the judiciary, the legislature and the executive, are supposed to keep everything functioning fairly and smoothly.

However, if you actually look at how the law works in practice, a different picture emerges. Marxists who have analysed the role of the law argue that the legal systems in bourgeois democracies are an expression of the state monopoly on violence. The state gains and maintains its power by having ‘special bodies of armed men’¹⁰ - the police, the army, the prison system - who can, when all other forms of coercion and compulsion are said and done, use violence and restraint and deprive you of your liberty and safety. The legal system helps to legitimise this use of violence and the threat of it, which lurks at all times behind peacetime calm.

Legal processes in our system legitimise and manage the system of exploitation that underpins capitalist material relations. The legal system is an expression of the power relationships in capitalist society, where there is a presumed formal equality in the exchange of commodities, but harsh and intense exploitation at the heart of the production of those commodities. The law plays a key role in legitimising and protecting exploitation, so that capitalists can keep making a profit.

China Miéville, reflecting on Russian Marxist Evgeny Pashukanis’ ideas in his text Between Equal Rights, argues that:

Where there is even the potentiality of disputation between the sovereign, formally equal individuals implied by commodity exchange […] a specific form of social regulation is necessary. It must formalise the method of settlement of any such dispute without diminishing either party’s sovereignty of equality.¹¹

The Civil law system, then, arises as a form of ‘social regulation.’ This is a way of mediating disputes that sanction, formalise, and modify existing social relations. These disputes may be between the state and its citizens, between parties in contracts, or between parties who can be seen to owe duties to one another within a capitalist society. In doing so, it provides a veneer of fairness and equality to an otherwise brutal system in which poverty and death in the working class are enforced and reinforced while a fraction of the population gets rich from the labour of others. The legal system manages the inherent antagonisms and contradictions that capitalism throws up - between worker and employer, tenant and landlord, creditor and debtor, etc. - while sidestepping any processes that may lead to a formation of class consciousness through collectivity.

As such, the legal system is inherently contradictory. It upholds formal equality between legal ‘subjects’ - rights-bearing individuals or companies - while actually amplifying the power of their different positions. Wealthier parties have far greater access to the legal system than poorer ones, and the legal system is designed to deliver on powerful people’s needs.

As an example, despite our massive homelessness crisis in Britain today, courts are sanctioning hundreds of evictions a week without consideration of what tenants will do when they are made homeless, under pressure to deliver on landlords’ property rights, often without hearing from the tenants at all.¹² There is little to no joined-up thinking with homeless departments at councils, putting other parts of the state under pressure. As another example, during the cost of living crisis, there were stories of courts waving through hundreds of warrants at once, allowing energy companies to send staff to break into debtors’ houses to fit expensive prepayment meters.¹³ And yet, once proceedings are over, both parties are expected to accept the result because it’s been through the courts. Justice has, apparently, been done.

It is in this context of the ‘management’ of social relations, that ‘social welfare’ law has emerged from over the last century and a half. Beginning with the Poor Man’s Lawyer in the 19th century, this developed into our modern-day (much assailed) Legal Aid system.¹⁴ Despite the fact the legal system was not designed for the working class, social welfare law affords some access to its power, and over time, rights have been won, in theory, to allow legal tools to be used to defend working class people to some extent from the impoverishing and disempowering effects of the system they live in. Though I would always argue for the need for robust social welfare law, there is a more pernicious byproduct of this move to legalism: it provides working class people with a veneer of protection that it’s difficult in practice for them to use.

This contradiction is probably most easily understood through real examples. I work in housing law representing tenants and homeless people. One of my recent clients, a man called Matthew,¹⁵ was evicted from his home after his supported accommodation provider went into liquidation. It turned out that the property itself was owned by a private landlord, who was cut into the financial arrangement between the Council and the accommodation provider. After the accommodation provider went bust, the arrangement fell apart, and Matthew couldn’t pay the extortionate rent, nearly £1000 a month for a room in a house-share. After a few months of threats, the landlord came into the house one day and changed the locks.

Matthew had nothing but his phone and the clothes on his back. He approached the Council for homelessness assistance, and they told him that, despite his disability, he wasn’t in ‘priority need’, and so they wouldn’t accept a duty to provide him with suitable accommodation. ‘Priority need’ is a legal category that has been created to allow Councils to turn some people away if they are not considered vulnerable enough. Matthew slept in a car park that night and then called me. Immediately, I asked for a review of the Council’s unlawful decision. Matthew was disabled, had lost his accommodation through no fault of his own, and street homelessness would clearly be dangerous for him. It took the Council 12 weeks to decide that I was right, 12 weeks in which he slept rough over Christmas.

To say that Matthew has legal ‘rights’ in this situation is true. However, his power to enforce his rights was limited, contingent, and reliant on things beyond his control. His ‘right’ to get advice on taking his landlord to court for illegally evicting him wasn’t much use when he had nowhere to charge his phone to keep in contact with me. His ‘right’ to homelessness assistance was denied unfairly, and there was no real consequence to the Council for failing him. The actors that fundamentally caused Matthew’s homelessness - capitalists who profited from his vulnerability then cut their losses when the margin narrowed - remain unaccountable. And anyway, no court can give him back 12 weeks of his life.

Eternal, immutable, and independent of space and time

Russian writer Evgeny Pashukanis has a lot to say about the philosophical abstraction of law. He writes:

Law, for bourgeois sociologists, becomes an empty form which is unconnected with concrete reality, with the relationships of production, with the antagonistic character of these relationships in class society, [and] with the presence of the state as a particular apparatus of power in the hands of the ruling class. Representatives of idealist philosophy of law go still further. They begin with “the idea of law”, which stands above social history as something eternal, immutable and independent of space and time.¹⁶

In our legal system, the student is trained to view themselves as a mere instrument of the rule of law, the ‘idealist’ vision of a lawyer or judge. Insofar as they are participants in an adversarial system, it is merely a game in which both sides must play their part to reach mediated ‘justice’.

Of course, not all lawyers actually absorb the abstract theory of law that Pashukanis derides, and once you’re working in the sector it becomes pretty clear it’s fiction. Lawyers know whose interests they’re protecting, and that unevenly distributed access to legal advice, the cost of legal representation, the structure and procedural particularities of the court system, and judges’ opinions about your client’s behaviour or social position all shape the outcome of legal cases. However, the ideology allows lawyers to justify their actions to themselves, even if they are not conservative in their personal politics: ‘I am merely counsel; I merely act on my instructions.’ They can claim to be neutral actors in a broadly fair system, a system that only incidentally swells their bank accounts.

In one example recently, I went to court to represent Sasha, who was being evicted from her home by a mortgage lender. Sasha was a care worker and also a carer for her own disabled son. From the paperwork, it seemed like the landlord Sasha signed a contract with had failed to pay his mortgage, and as a result, his mortgage lender had taken over control of his properties and was now trying to evict Sasha to sell the house at a higher price. Sasha was extremely stressed as she had nowhere to go and she had always paid her rent. How could she have known what her landlord would do with it? A proper capitalist doom-vision.

At court, the ‘other side’, the mortgage lender, were being represented by a woman of about my age, relatively newly trained. While we waited for the judge to call us in, she told me she was also representing a few other landlords on the same day. Without prompting, she told me how much of a relief it was when “the tenants don’t turn up”, because it makes her job much easier. She said it breezily, with no trace of remorse, even though when the tenants don’t turn up, it means her job is to argue for them to be evicted in their absence.

A wider example of the ideology at work can be found in the argument that took place when a number of barristers in 2023 signed a statement to say that they would refuse to act for new fossil fuel projects or to prosecute members of campaign groups opposing new fossil fuel projects, such as Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, and Just Stop Oil.¹⁷ This was seen, both in the right-wing press and by many in the profession as a transgression of what is known as the ‘cab rank rule’. This is the loose rule that states that barristers must take whatever case they are offered without thought to their own partisan alignment.

The convention has a purpose. If no criminal defence lawyers agreed to take cases that related to crimes considered heinous for example, there would be no protection for individuals against the state prosecuting them for those crimes. The ‘rule’ is meant to prevent lawyers from discriminating and cherry-picking. However, it doesn’t really operate so simply in practice. Big oil would never treat hiring a lawyer like calling a taxi. Fossil fuel companies have a roster of well-paid barristers to choose from, as well as in-house legal teams of hundreds of solicitors and paralegals. As Michael Mansfield KC put it, ‘behind every new oil and gas deal sits a lawyer getting rich.’¹⁸ No-one with a dozen chauffeurs calls a cab.

The furore revealed the ideological underpinning of the legal sector. A desire to use law for good - and not use it for bad - was seen by some as an attack on the rule of law itself. Lawyers, in this liberal imagination, are simply tools to deliver arguments in a system where upholding the underlying truth and justice of the law as written is the aim. Bias or even political commitment on the part of lawyers is therefore seen as a warping of the system - or at least when it leans in an anti-establishment direction.

Meanwhile, in July 2024, a judge sentenced Just Stop Oil activists to a collective 21 years in prison for leading a planning meeting on Zoom, citing the ‘rule of law’ and ‘democracy’ against them.¹⁹ The judge claims all he was doing was enacting the ‘will of parliament’, since the recent Tory government passed the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, which allows protesters to be given higher sentences for certain protest crimes. Though liberal defenders of our legal system would disagree, for me this is just more evidence that the rule of law is not a ‘check and balance’ on state violence, but underpins it.

Laurence Fox, widely recognised to be a far-right actor in British politics (in both senses), recently wrote for the Law Gazette, arguing that ‘what the country needs is a legal think tank that does not seek to change the law, nor use the law to bring political change, but which is committed to keeping politics out of law.’²⁰ This is an absurd thing to say even on its own terms. Politicians create law, and as such law is a product of politics. Politics cannot be kept out of law. The very fact a legal publication has given the founder of the Reclaim political party a platform to wax lyrical about law exemplifies how interwoven the political and legal spheres are. The continuing pretence that law operates ‘above’ politics only serves those who wish to further the legal status quo and the power imbalances it perpetuates.

Lawyers are wilfully misunderstanding their role if they believe they can represent one side but be on neither.

The allure of legalism

If politics cannot be kept out of law, then it can be tempting to consider all ‘lawfare’ on the side of positive social change (or in defence of working class people) as a political strategy. However, it is important not to present those representing the oppressed and exploited as ‘heroic’ in some sense. That too is part of the ideology of the legal system. In its focus on individual rights and cases that are taken in isolation from their wider causes, legal approaches can push people towards taking individual action rather than fighting collectively for a goal. David Renton compellingly summarises arguments against centring law in fights for social and political change in his book Against the Law.²¹ He argues that, even when we win a change using the law, it is an expensive process with often disappointing results,²² and drains energy from social movements and worker organising that could achieve longer-term, more fundamental change.

When my housing clients have a legal problem, it tends not to be their only problem. They may have a dozen problems all at once: with their landlord, the benefits system, their employer, the doctor, the council, their social worker, their creditors, the Home Office (for those with immigration issues), their support worker (for those with mental health issues), the police (for those who are alleged to have committed crimes). These are only ‘legal problems’ because generally, short of other collective options, the only way they can face up to them is through the legal system. Organisations like tenants’ unions and trade unions offer a different, more collective way to approach these same problems, though they often have to tangle with the legal system because that approach is so dominant in our society, and the powerful often aim to force us down legalistic routes because it is a terrain on which they are comfortable and can usually win. Despite this, a tenants’ union can sometimes win better outcomes than a lawyer could, because it has a wider range of tactics at its disposal, such as negative publicity, protest, rent strike, and the threat of getting more tenants involved - all unfamiliar, uncomfortable or even professionally hazardous to lawyers.

It is possible to deal with this contradiction. Following critical legal academic Robert Knox,²³ I think that rather than a ‘strategy’ for making change, selected legal battles should instead be viewed as a ‘tactic’, the ‘the achievement of short term, conjunctural [goals].’ The work Public Interest Law Centre has done recently is a good example, using the law to support a movement of tenants on the Aylesbury Estate to defend their homes from being demolished as part of the gentrification of Southwark in London.²⁴ Their work has centred residents on the estate and sought to keep them at the heart of the story and leading the decision-making. They have shown that law can be a tool for campaigners, as long as lawyers remain humble about the law’s limitations. Small wins won’t change the world, but they can contribute a weapon to the arsenal of wider movements.

In my work as a Legal Aid caseworker and studying towards my legal qualifications, I am constantly trying to resist the pull of both aspects of legal ideology discussed above. On the one hand, I recognise that lawyers are actors for parties with material interests, resisting the pressure to drift into abstraction, revere the legal system itself, and hide (or lose) my politics. On the other, as Audre Lorde put it, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’;²⁵ despite the allure of the small wins that can be achieved, I try to see the limitations of the legal system and the role it places me in within a wider system, and argue for strategies for changing the world which do not rely too heavily on judges, courts, and lawyers.