About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

7 Dalhousie L.J. 831 (1982-1983)
Legal Competence Yesterday and Tomorrow

handle is hein.journals/dalholwj7 and id is 1309 raw text is: Leon E. Trakman* Legal Competence Yesterday and Tomorrow I. Introduction Attacks have been lodged against the legal profession for many years, indeed, since even before Shakespeare commented in Henry VI, The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. However, it is only more recently, with the growth of mass education and public awareness and with technological advances, that suspicions of the incompetence of lawyers has arisen again with a vengeance. Some would credit this new trend to the condemnation of alleged incompetence among trial lawyers by Chief Justice Burger of the American Supreme Court. But to limit the attack on lawyers to this Chief Justice is to ignore the fact that problems of lawyers' abilities and performance are the inevitable outgrowth of an increasingly rights-oriented public, which has responded to the democratic system by questioning the utility of the lawyering services they receive in return for their money. The members of an educated community, conscious of the exchange of values in a free enterprise system, will ultimately question the mystique that surrounds the legal profession; they will doubt the lawyers' use of a covetted and impenetrable language, and they will likely decline to accept advice without reason, delay without cause, and inefficiency without excuse. This paper examines the issue of professional competence, principally from the perspective of a legal educator functioning within a law school setting. The following basic questions are posed. First, what is the meaning of professional competence in the legal profession? Second, who determines the parameters of professional competence in law? Third, what forms of legal education are needed in order to provide society with lawyers who best satisfy such standards of professional competence? II. The Meaning of Professional Incompetence One might well presuppose that incompetence encompasses only an inability to perform. An incompetent lawyer would then be inept; he *Professor of Law, Dalhousie University.

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most