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October 20, 2006
Cyril Chern, GeekLawyer, and their Inns of Court.
Two years ago, my friend Cyril Chern, an American and former Los Angeles judge who moved to London and qualified as a barrister, took me to lunch at Gray's Inn. It was an amazing and even moving experience. Cyril belongs to Gray's, one of the four Inns of Court around the Royal Courts of Justice in legal London. The others are Middle Temple, Inner Temple and Lincoln's Inn. Gray's Inn is not a bar association, country club or non-merit doo-dah faux old boys club. Like the Cosmos Club, my grandfather's group in Washington, D.C., where you can't be invited unless you create, build, write or invent something pretty amazing, you must do something unique and useful to be admitted, meet and eat at ancient Gray's: become a barrister. There are about 11,000 of these creatures in England and Wales.
The Inns are independent societies which regulate the training, admission (calling) and discipline of barristers. And they are quite old, with legends and lore to go with it. Gray's Inn's foundations were laid in the late 1300s, and I remember normally-uninhibited Cyril told me in a nearly hushed tone as we respectfully dined that the walls of the Hall, or dining room, are partially adorned with wood from a captured Spanish galleon. This had been a gift of Queen Elizabeth I to the Inn. Ah, but it's not all pomp and tradition. The English have enough Celt in them to mix austerity with play and pleasure. GeekLawyer, who is wonderful and flat-out nuts, is a prominent IP lawyer and Brit blogger. GL is also a barrister who is admitted at Lincoln's Inn. He just posted that perhaps the best part of Lincoln's for him was "to get pissed and try his luck with intelligent bits of posh totty". Cheers.
Posted by JD Hull at October 20, 2006 11:47 PM