An Anatomy of the Practice of Law in Nineteenth-Century Auckland

Abstract

THE nineteenth century saw the rise in the western world of the professional classes. And in their forefront were lawyers. As commercial services in Britain expanded, so did the demand for legal skills. As early as 1840, according to Sir George Stephen, there was 'scarcely any important transaction in which a merchant can engage that does not more or less require the counsel of his solicitor'. During the Age of Victoria the process accelerated enormously. In the Antipodes over the same period, lawyers became considerable men of affairs. In nineteenth-century New Zealand, politics and administration were thickly peopled by men trained in law. But it was in the world of buying and selling that the qualifications of this profession were at their most marketable. In commerce and conveyancing the arcane skills of solicitors proved indispensable. Indeed so close were the connections of lawyers with banks, with capitalists providing money at interest, and with merchants, that they are rightly to be seen as the great facilitators of colonial business. In this regard they were much more akin to the solicitors of Scotland than to any English counterpart. This being so, is not our ignorance of the actual workings of early New Zealand legal practices remarkable? Where firms have written of themselves, the accounts have generally been slight, perhaps because they have been put together for in-house consumption. Granted, the histories of the New Zealand Law Society — national and district — have been much more substantial.But they