Life at USyd law

A student writes ... The plight of women in the law debated in class ... St Paul's College ra-ras now a minority ... How things have changed ... Since Rake and Crownies summer clerkships at the ODPP are the hottest items in town 

A dear friend of the family, a Melbourne silk, once recounted an anecdote from his early days in the law.

As a young blade he was an associate to a former chief justice. He tells the story that one evening when he was dining with one of the other HC judges he started to hold forth passionately about legal ethics. 

At this point HH interrupted:

"My dear chap, reading legal ethics is a little like having a poo. We all do it, we needn't talk about it."

I have this tale buzzing in my head as I trudged towards the bi-weekly Legal Profession class.

The lecturer insisted, "This is not a class one can just rock-up to in the last week and cram one's way through". 

Having essentially guessed the contents of the Corporations Act, morphed all my knowledge from Equity into a vaguely legible response to directors' duties (by using "fiduciary" every third word) and true, true, true-ing my way through the multiple choice section to land a scintillating 56 percent in the recent Corps law paper, I very much doubted the truth of what was being put. 

Nonetheless, after a relaxing 40 minutes of in-seminar private reading (no, seriously, I used to question the logic of this in kindergarten before we had smartphones) we were asked to debate the plight of women in the profession.

After a generous 20 minutes of discussion, I felt if it my duty to shout down a colleague who claimed that the NSW bar was "the last bastion of the boys' club".

Had he never played billiards beneath the Cedar Room at the Australian Club?.

My interjection: "You do realise how baby-friendly private practice can be?"

This was not well received.

In times gone by I might have expected a few chuckles and the odd guffaw. But, we had just read the grim statistics telling of law-school life, pre-Whitlam government.

In that frightening age, the average law student was a St Pauls ra-ra of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, middle-to upper-middle class, male - not unlike Edward Gough for that matter.

I looked around the lecture theatre after my baby-barrister gaff and noted the male majority had vanished.

A moment later I received a text message from a delightful female friend, also in the same class: 

"What must it have been like to have sat that class in the 60s?"

Through a Mad Men-meets-Rumpole haze I imagined the class being conducted through a blanket of cigar smoke by a lecturer in a well-cut three-piece suit, between swigs of malt, imploring his wide-eyed and hung-over young horde of boys to, "only pat the bottoms of your OWN typists ... it is considered poor form to delve into the briefs of others in your chambers".

I am lost here in pure fantasy, of course, and acres of riches for the ABC producer who can convince the commissioning editors that there must be frustrated conveyencers out there in Pymble that want the Don Draper treatment.

Which brings me to Cleaver Greene.

I have a bone to pick with someone at the ABC. When I set out on this ultimately confounding decision to go to law school I was set on a mucky career, in crime at some point down the track.

Thanks to Crownies and Rake, the national broadcaster has made a summer clerkship at the ODPP, (formerly the "pulling beers at the Sheaf" of legal work experience) the most coveted job in town.

If I were to receive another email from Allen & Overy begging for a résumé to join their Mandarin-speaking corporate financing team, I might have to march down to Harris Street for a serious word with Roxborough.