M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law

by DiSalvo, Charles R.

  Even with his immediate family in the fold, however, Gandhi’s plan was controversial. To make his way to London, he needed to travel from Rajkot to Bombay, where he would board a steamer for England. Bombay was even more populated by members of his caste than his hometown. This was unfortunate for Gandhi; there was heated resistance on the part of his caste to the notion of any of their members going abroad. A series of incidents in which Gandhi was peppered with harassment on the streets of Bombay for his intentions was followed by an even more dramatic public confrontation. Gandhi was forced to attend a meeting of his entire caste, at which the subject of his going abroad would be addressed before the whole group. The discussion came to a head with this ultimatum issued by the leader of the caste to Gandhi: “We were your father’s friends, and therefore we feel for you; as heads of the caste you know our power. We are positively informed that you will have to eat flesh and drink wine in England; moreover, you have to cross the waters; all this you must know is against our caste rules. Therefore, we command you to reconsider your decision, or else the heaviest punishment will be meted out to you.”4 Gandhi’s unequivocal response was to reject the threat, saying that he was going nonetheless. The head of the caste there upon decreed that Gandhi was no longer his father’s son, ordered all members of the caste to have nothing to do with him, and declared him an outcast.

  While the initial idea of taking up legal studies did not belong to Gandhi, it is clear from his determination to remain unaffected by the decision of his caste and to overcome the other obstacles to his going that once he embraced an arrangement thrust upon him by others, he advanced that arrangement with all the same energy and spirit of one who gave birth to it. Just as he had been faithful to his arranged marriage, he would be faithful to the plan to study the law, foreshadowing his faithfulness to the integrity of the legal process itself that would distinguish his career in the law.

  On September 4, 1888, two weeks after being ejected from his caste, Gandhi boarded a steamship for London.

  THE DISMAL STATE OF BRITISH LEGAL TRAINING

  The world of legal education into which Gandhi stepped in the fall of 1888 would be almost unrecognizable to legal educators today. It is now almost universally true that there is a serious academic component in one’s training for the bar, usually in a university context. It often includes or is followed by practical training in either simulated or actual practice settings or both.

  Legal education at the close of the nineteenth century in London could hardly have been more different. To begin with, the student prepared for the call to the bar in something other than a traditional university setting. Since at least the middle of the fourteenth century those who wished to become barristers received their call to the bar by first enrolling in one of the four Inns of Court. The source of the term “inn” is instructive. Historian Robert Pearce tells us, “The word ‘Inne’ was anciently used to denote the town houses in which great men resided when they were in attendance at court.”5 From this beginning the various Inns grew into powerful voluntary associations of barristers, centered in London, the purpose of which was to control entry to the bar and to provide young men an environment within which to read the law in preparation for their bar examinations.6 One must be quick to add, however, that there appears to have been another function of the Inns, namely to school barristers-to-be in the long-standing elitist traditions of the bar. This tradition had deep historical roots. Sir John Fortescue, the Lancastrian chief justice, speaking of the practices of the fifteenth century, said that “the greatest nobility . . . often place their children in those Inns . . . not so much to make the laws their study, much less to live by the profession . . . but to form their manners.”7

  This deep-rooted awareness of manners and social status persisted down to the time Gandhi began his studies and was no more evident than in the requirement that the student eat a minimum number of dinners with his fellow students and the senior barristers of his Inn while awaiting his call to the bar. Dinners were highly stylized affairs, emphasizing hierarchy, formality, and tradition.

  At earlier points in their history, the Inns provided the students with lengthy and careful lectures, known as readings, by distinguished members of the bar. The reader prepared an elaborate discussion of an act or statute that, after being delivered, was followed by a series of arguments by barristers about the incorrectness of the reader’s opinion, followed itself by the reader’s rebuttal. In addition to these readings, the students were provided with the opportunity to observe mock exercises called bolts and moots.

  KEEPING TERMS: DINNER AS EDUCATION

  By the time of Gandhi’s arrival these practices had disappeared, and the Inns, while retaining their control over admission, had, with respect to their pedagogical function, descended to institutions akin to educationally undemanding social fraternities. The practice of “keeping terms,” as the dinner requirement was known, remained, but in an eviscerated form. Four terms a year were held. A student was required to keep twelve terms in all, meaning that one could complete his preparation for the bar in just under three years. During these terms, students with university educations were required to dine at least three times during each term in a dining hall run by the Inn while nonuniversity students, like Gandhi, were required to eat dinner there at least six times a term. Students and barristers would be seated at tables of four, while the “benchers” would be seated separately.8 Although all were required to appear for dinner attired in their formal gowns, there was no requirement that any part of the dinner conversation center on the law. Indeed there was not even any conversation between the students and the benchers. There were no readings, lectures, or speeches. There were no moot exercises, the custom of conducting mock trials having been discarded long before Gandhi arrived. The only requirement was that the student, to get credit for attending, appear before grace was said and remain present throughout the dinner until a concluding after-dinner grace was said. By 1888, it appeared that keeping terms had lost any function it may once have had to impart a formal legal education to the students and was reduced to nothing more than a ceremony to inculcate in the student the manners of his profession.9

  Apart from dinners there was no setting in which students were required to come in contact with either lecturers or practitioners.10 The students’ days were their own. A diligent student would occupy himself, perhaps in one of the Inns’ comfortable libraries, with the reading entailed in meeting the only academic requirements of this process: the passage of two written examinations, one in Roman law and one in English law. The Student’s Guide to the Bar, by William Ball of the Inner Temple, published in 1879, states that the knowledge required to pass the Roman law examination was slight, and advises that for the person with a university education, “six weeks’ work of . . . six hours a day would be sufficient.”11 In the period before Gandhi arrived in England, the English law examination had developed a reputation for being not much more challenging than that in Roman law, with Ball estimating that “four months’ work of . . . six hours a day ought to be amply sufficient for a University man of average abilities and education.”12 The picture changed just before Gandhi started his studies. Writing on the eve of Gandhi’s arrival in London, T. B. Napier and R. M. Stephenson, authors of A Practical Guide to the Bar (1888), claimed that “until quite recently the difficulty of the Bar examinations was greatly underrated” and that the “percentage of men who are ploughed for the Bar examinations is tolerably large.”13 It is not surprising, then, that they advised more study than Ball, namely two to three months of steady work for the Roman law examination and more than just “a few months’ reading” for the English law examination.14

  The final condition for being called to the bar was simply that the applicant be at least twenty-one.

  These were the requirements to be called to the Bar in Gandhi’s day, a set of criteria so minimal that it was universally agreed that one’s legal education at the Inns had to be supplemented by an app
renticeship if one was to have any chance of success as a barrister. By associating himself with a practitioner, the pupil could familiarize himself with practice not only by observing the work of his barrister but by helping in the work itself, such as by drafting conveyances and pleadings under the barrister’s supervision. Opinions as to how long a pupil should read in chambers, as it was called, ranged from one to three years.15

  THE INNER TEMPLE

  Like every barrister-to-be, Gandhi had his choice of inns. Of the four—Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, the Middle Temple, and the Inner Temple—the Inner Temple was the most expensive.16 Gandhi chose the Inner Temple. Given the difficulty he had in India raising the funds to support himself in England, and given his lifelong habit of squeezing every ounce out of every rupee, a habit already well developed when he arrived in England, this is something of a surprise. Because there is no record indicating why Gandhi chose the Inner Temple, we can only speculate. Perhaps he chose it because it was the most prestigious; the Inner Temple numbers Lord Coke, for example, among its graduates. Perhaps he chose it because it had the largest membership and because he thought he could therefore expect to find there the company of a fair number of countrymen.17 The most plausible explanation, however, is that he chose it because it focused on the common law, the study of which would aid him later in his practice in India.18

  Whatever Gandhi’s reason for choosing the Inner Temple, it was not unlike the other Inns with respect to the abysmal level of training it offered aspiring barristers. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Inns had fallen to a very low point. Only the most minimal intellectual standards were maintained. It was not until the decade before Gandhi’s arrival, in 1872, that the Inns agreed to require students to take a bar examination, and it was not until the very year Gandhi arrived in England that all the Inns required that nonmatriculates take and pass a special entrance examination. Since Gandhi had already passed the Bombay matriculation examination, he was excused from the preliminary examination to which nonmatriculates were subject. Gandhi’s agenda, therefore, was clear and simple: to be called to the bar, he had only to keep terms and pass examinations in Roman and English law.

  But Gandhi was still a student without a university degree, while the great majority of his fellow students were university graduates.19 To make matters worse, Gandhi didn’t even have full command of the English language. When he was unceremoniously invited to leave a swank restaurant because of what were perceived to be his bad manners, he assuaged his pain by resolving to take on Western ways and master “the task of becoming an English gentleman.” As part of his plan to become more sophisticated, Gandhi began searching for a suitable program of study. The reputation of the special admission examination for nonmatriculates was that it was a pushover, requiring only minimal knowledge of Latin, English, and English history. Gandhi needed something quite different to distinguish himself. In the University of London matriculation examination he found a suitably difficult challenge.20 In addition to the subjects tested on the bar’s special examination, this examination required that the student know other subjects, including science and a modern language. Gandhi chose to be tested in French, a language with which he had some familiarity. Joining a private matriculation class and keeping meticulous fidelity to a self-imposed schedule, Gandhi undertook a five-month course of fairly arduous private study that culminated in his taking the examination in January 1890, nearly a year and a half after landing on England’s shores. The results were not good. Gandhi, to use his phrase, got “ploughed in Latin.”21 Latin and French together, he later admitted, were too much for him.

  Gandhi was unbowed. He renewed his studies, substituting “heat and light” for the more difficult subject of chemistry, and reattacking Latin, for which, he says, he acquired a taste. At the same time, Gandhi apparently was suffering from pangs of guilt, thinking that he was spending his family’s fortune only to meet failure. Accordingly, he secured a smaller apartment and began eating more of his meals at home. The change, he says, “harmonized my inner and outer life. It was also more in keeping with the means of my family. My life was certainly more truthful and my soul knew no bounds of joy.”22 Gandhi took the examination in June 1890 and, this time, passed it. Making his accomplishment all the more noteworthy is the fact that for much of the time prior to his taking the London examination, he was also preparing for his examination in Roman law, which he took just three months earlier.

  BAR EXAMINATIONS

  Those in the business of advising law students at the time universally recommended that the Roman law examination be taken at the earliest possible moment, thus freeing up the maximum amount of time to study for the examination in English law that followed. Inns permitted their students to take the Roman law examination after four terms. Gandhi would have completed his first four terms with the end of the Trinity term in mid-June 1889, yet he did not take the Roman law examination until March 1890. Why the delay? The most likely explanation is that Gandhi divided his attention for a substantial period of time between his preparation for the Roman law and London examinations.23 Whatever the reason for the delay in taking the Roman law examination, Gandhi was not hurt by it. He finished sixth out of the forty-six who sat for it. Not a bad showing for one who was not a “University man.”24

  With the Roman law and London examinations both behind him, Gandhi opened the summer of 1890 with but one more substantial hurdle: passage of the English law examination (known as the “bar finals”). This examination could not be taken before one had kept nine terms. For Gandhi, his ninth term would be completed with the conclusion of the 1890 Michaelmas term on November 25, 1890. For this examination, Gandhi was out of the gate with the crack of the starter’s gun, sitting for it at the first opportunity, from December 15 to December 20, 1890. While this set of dates falls just six months after his London examination, Gandhi actually spent more time than that to prepare, pouring himself into the common law for “nine months of fairly hard labor.”25 Even accounting for a month he spent in Brighton in the summer of 1890 and accounting for the study he undertook earlier in 1890 to pass the Roman law and London examinations, the amount of study Gandhi invested in preparation for the bar finals exceeded the four months of study recommended by Ball for a university-educated person. In his autobiography, Gandhi recounts that he managed to increase his burden of preparation by forgoing the use of notes on the law that were circulating among students, choosing instead to go directly to the recommended textbooks instead. Foreshadowing the scrupulousness that would characterize his entire life at the bar, he felt that to do otherwise would be a fraud. Accordingly, he purchased and read “all the text-books . . . , investing much money in them.”26 Among the treatises Gandhi read were Snell’s The Principles of Equity, Intended for the Use of Students and the Profession, which he found “full of interest, but a bit hard to understand” and which actually would aid him in his religious explorations later in life, and Williams’ Principles of the Law of Real Property, Intended as a First Book for the Use of Students in Conveyancing,27 surely the only law text in existence ever described as reading “like a novel.”28

  Gandhi’s industriousness paid dividends. On January 12, 1891, he learned that he had passed his bar finals. Validating Napier and Stephenson’s observation that the test had recently become more difficult than most thought,29 32 of the 109 test takers failed. Of the 77 who passed, Gandhi placed in the top half, finishing 34th.

  Gandhi placed fairly highly, too, in the esteem of his fellow “dinner barristers,” as they were then called, but not for very admirable reasons. Each table of four was allocated a set amount of wine for each meal. With the abstemious Gandhi at one’s table, the wine could be split not four ways, but three. As a result, Gandhi was very much in demand as a dinner companion.

  AN APPRENTICESHIP FORGONE

  And dinner was his last formal obligation, for with his passing the bar finals, Gandhi had now fulfilled all the academic requirements for the call to
the bar. But for the necessity of keeping the Hilary, Easter, and Trinity terms, he had no obligations between the end of his test on December 20, 1890, and the date in early June 1891 when he could anticipate being called to the bar. While an apprenticeship was not a requirement for being called, students were nonetheless strongly advised to use the half-year between the bar finals and the call, as well as a period of one to two years after the call, to learn how to practice by serving as apprentices in the offices of practicing barristers. Without the experience of pupilage, it was adjudged that the “greatest amount of theoretical or book knowledge [was] comparatively worthless.”30

  For reasons he does not explain, and apparently contrary to the general advice he later gave others, Gandhi never apprenticed.31 Why forgo the experience? Perhaps Gandhi deemed practice in India so different from that in England that apprenticing would have been a waste of his time—an unlikely supposition in light of the court system operated by the British Empire in India. Perhaps the fastidiously economical Gandhi did not believe he could afford to apprentice; after all, it was not free. A pupil was expected to pay his barrister fifty guineas for each six months of pupilage. Perhaps Gandhi could not find a barrister who would take him on for such a relatively short period of time with no prospect of Gandhi’s returning the investment with permanent employment. Perhaps Gandhi, lacking close connections to the British bar, could find no barrister at all. The most intriguing explanation, however, is that Gandhi was preoccupied with a realm of life entirely separate from the bar.