This is the inaugural column of "Agony Uncle" Geeklawyer. Geeklawyer, to his astonishment, receives a huge postbag of pathetic begging requests from readers with nowhere else to turn. Ever willing to humiliate the desperate Geeklawyer deigns to answer these via his new column.
Mr C Writes: "I am a law lecturer at an elite private further education college for 16-18 year olds. Unfortunately my grades at university were embarrassingly poor: I got a 2.1 in Politics Philosophy and Economics from a northern university. I am desperately keen to get to the Bar or even, at a pinch, a Magic Circle Law firm. I read, on such august websites such as "Pupillage and How to Get It", such tales of woe that my heart sinks. Can you advise me on how to rise to the top of the legal profession?"
Dear "C":
First of all Geeklawyer would congratulate you on the two most valuable qualities in any lawyer: aspiration, determination, detachment from rational objectivity and numeracy. Well done, you are almost half way to being a Solicitor Inadequate, if no further toward the height of the profession: the Bar. Geeklawyer does not suggest that there is anything wrong with being a solicitor: on the contrary people will always need conveyancing done, or a defense rendered on a speeding charge. But you have loftier aspirations and on such things are ambition built.
You have a number of problems in your aspiration to be the next Attorney General. Social progress is a wonderful feature of the modern egalitarian age. The days when having a mother who slopped out piss-buckets for the local squire's garden parties was a bar to social advancement are over. Many say that this is a good thing and Geeklawyer offers no opinion. Or at least none other than to ask, meaning no disrespect to your mother, into whose bucket does one piss if there is no decrepit pockmarked old hag around? Perhaps that is a little churlish and so Geeklawyer will say no more.
But what is, is. Your mother has spent 40 years emptying party urine for your future. She must feel that you are due a reward. Sadly, Geeklawyer thinks that you suffer from the malaise so often seen in this egalitarian age: being good and succeeding are not enough. And of course since your went to a 'Northern University' are you really up to the Bar?
The Bar is for gentlemen: gentlemen with good firsts from good universities. Perhaps you should consider becoming a solicitor? So many failed barristers take this option nowadays that it barely retains any stigma at all. And recall that an associate City solicitor will make more money than most barristers. If one comes from a poor background such mundane financial considerations are so much more relevant than style, as they should be.
My first suggestion would be to snag a bit of posh totty to provide social camouflage. Then do another degree and get a brilliant double first; follow this with an equally brilliant masters and a seminal doctoral thesis.
Get your new wife's family the outrageous BVC fees and then tell a decent set of chambers, say Blackstone, that you require a pupillage and a tenancy at their earliest convenience; for heavens sake do this politely since many chambers are remarkably snotty with uppity BVC students, heaven alone knows why.
Spend your first few years defending chav burglars or possession applications and then make ask the Department for Constitutional affairs if they'd be good enough to make you a QC. After that your path to the bench is assured, Geeklawyer understands.
'C': you'll agree that this is obvious advice, and the best advice usually is. Should you elect to become a solicitor Geeklawyer will be terribly disappointed but you can still become a proper lawyer: later in your career when you are a position to retire from partnership, and with your career connections in place, you can dabble at the Bar as a hobby, insulated from the poverty. Many chambers welcome ex-solicitors for their client connections.
Welcome to the Middle class.
Nonetheless, you have not impressed Geeklawyer with your commonsense and he suggests that you stick to banging rich 17 year old girls in exchange for 'A' grade A level marks. Fuck knows he would were he a loser like you.
Are you a member of the legal profession with a problem an older more unpleasant colleague can help with? If so email Geeklawyer at geeklawyer [at} gmail dot com
New blog post: Dear Geeklawyer http://tinyurl.com/3tsnv7
Or you can email moon at moon_watcher_2007@hotmail.co.uk and join the revolutionary counter forces that will one day overthrow the corrupt system to replace it with one that although less corrupt will see us leaders of the revolution in positions of power.
Get on the look out for a statistics paper that compares the No of 2.1s then and now. If your potential employer turns you down without any use of a 'weighting factor' to take account of the discrepancy, use the Age Discrimination Legislation to take him to the cleaners.
Nona would you not also have to prove that the differance in any variation of the grades awarded was the result of grade inflation as opposed to say people putting more of an effort into their University degree becuase it's costing them an arm and a leg?
I would have thought you were on very fragile grounds with such an action, but hey i'm no law person so perhaps it would be possible. You could equally imagine a counter-claim if 2.1's from older people were given higher credence than those from young people.
Geek,
It might be time to give up the cider.
oh? why didn't you like my new column?
"Nona would you not also have to prove that..."
Don't try and prove why. If you want to prove that people are better taught now than then, work harder now than then, do so; but it doesn't matter. Simply, if you can say that if someone who went through todays system got better grades than someone going through yesteryears system, then if you don't take this into account on application forms by some sort of weighting mechanism you are discriminating against them on the basis of age. The reasons why are irrelevant.
In order to defeat the claim you would need to try and find some excuse from other aspects of the application, eg 'they weren't a scout master and the other person was' and peddle this as a reason.
As usual I've only gravitated towards this blog after my weekend has already started, which worries me -
I think the employer would have to be able to come up with a weighting that was exact enough to completely represent the change in teaching standards over the years. We can (perhaps) say standards aren't what they were - but a 2:1 in 2008 is worth how much of one achieved in 1988? 0.8? 0.6? 0.9?
Treating the 2:1s the same could be found to be discriminatory but the employer could justify the discrimination as being a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim, given that he can't practically introduce a reliable weighting system to avoid it, the weightings being so imprecise.
My word GL, first religion then law of all things - this blog is attracting a worrying amount of serious debate.
My word GL, first religion then law of all things - this blog is attracting a worrying amount of serious debate
Don't blame me!! I'm trying to stop that happening.
"but a 2:1 in 2008 is worth"
Aaaaarrrrgggghhhhh
It's not about worth it's just some simple statistical correlation. The average student then would get Cs, the average student now may get Bs. May depending upon the results of the statistical analysis found in the paper I mentioned in the original post.
Slough the value judgements. Think of it simply as two equivalent people being ground through an education mill: even though they're equivalent one gets straight Cs, the other straight Bs. The only difference is that they went through two different systems yet they are being directly compared on the basis of the final grade. Curiously, both grades are worth exactly the same as the other in the scenario that I've set up; hence, the one with the 'lower grade' may be being discriminated against.
But faced with a number of candidates, one who graduated from Liverpool in 1990, one from Manchester in 1995, one from Oxford in 2000, and so on, what weighting should the employer adopt? If he can't do it with a certain measure of precision and reliability, he doesn't have to do it, that's my point.
Really - if the current system discriminates, how would you improve it?
"...how would you improve it?"
I think that everyone does preliminary testing eg, see Eversheds and similar.
I doubt it would be possible to improve it.