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The Seven Lamps of Advocacy
The Seven Lamps of Advocacy
The Seven Lamps of Advocacy
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The Seven Lamps of Advocacy

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The Seven Lamps of Advocacy examines and explores moral dilemmas and conundrums through analogies, stories and social commentary. This definitive text remains a set text at many legal institutions. Its dedication to reasoned argument, philosophical ideals, moral problems and pronounced judgement make it an interesting yet easy-to-read classic. It includes the lamps of Honesty, Courage, Industry, Wit, Eloquence, Judgement, and Fellowship.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherGood Press
Release dateNov 5, 2021
ISBN4066338065810
The Seven Lamps of Advocacy

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    The Seven Lamps of Advocacy - Edward Abbott, Sir Parry

    Edward Abbott Sir Parry

    The Seven Lamps of Advocacy

    Published by Good Press, 2022

    [email protected]

    EAN 4066338065810

    Table of Contents

    I THE LAMP OF HONESTY

    II THE LAMP OF COURAGE

    III THE LAMP OF INDUSTRY

    IV THE LAMP OF WIT

    V THE LAMP OF ELOQUENCE

    VI THE LAMP OF JUDGMENT

    VII THE LAMP OF FELLOWSHIP

    INDEX

    I

    THE LAMP

    OF HONESTY

    I

    THE LAMP OF HONESTY

    Table of Contents

    The

    great advocate is like the great actor: he fills the stage for his span of life, succeeds, gains our applause, makes his last bow, and the curtain falls. Nothing is so elusive as the art of acting, unless indeed it be the sister art of advocacy. You cannot say that the methods of Garrick, Kean or Irving, Erskine, Hawkins or Russell, were the right methods or the only methods, or even that they were the best methods of practising their several arts; you can only say that they succeeded in their day, and that their contemporaries acclaimed them as masters.

    Inasmuch as their methods were often new and startling to their own generation, the young student of acting or advocacy is eager to believe that there are no methods and no technique to learn, and no school in which to graduate. Youth is at all times prone to act on the principle that there are no principles, that there is no one from whom it can learn, and nothing to teach. Any one, it seems, can don a wig and gown, and thereby become an advocate. Yet there are principles of advocacy; and if a few generations were to forget to practise these, it would indeed be a lost art. The student of advocacy can draw inspiration and hope from the stored-up experience of his elders. He can trace in the plans and life-charts of the ancients the paths along which they strode, journeying towards Eldorado. True, these figures of forgotten advocates are dim and obscure—only to be painfully seen through the dusty gauzes of forgotten years, pictured for us in drowsy voluminous memoirs, or baldly reported in mouldering law reports; but if we search these records diligently we gradually discern a race of worthy men—see them haunting the old libraries, pacing the ancient halls with their clients, proud of the traditions of their great profession—advocates—advocates all.

    It is in an endeavour to recapture something of the lives of these great ones, and the principles upon which they built their success, that I have struggled through forbidding masses of decaying biography in hopes to catch a faint whisper here and there of the triumphant works and days of my professional forbears.

    For a race of moderns, that, maybe, care for none of these things, I have lighted again the old lamps which burned so brightly in the days that are gone, which I myself have seen lighting the darkness of our courts, and guiding the footsteps of the judges in the paths of justice and truth. For without a free and honourable race of advocates the world will hear little of the message of justice. Advocacy is the outward and visible appeal for the spiritual gift of justice. The advocate is the priest in the temple of justice, trained in the mysteries of the creed, active in its exercises. For this reason Wyclif in his translation of I John ii. 1 sanctifies the word in the text: We haue auoket anentis the fadir, Jhesu Crist just. Modern versions retain advocate, but unhappily substitute righteous for just. Advocacy connotes justice. Upon the altars of justice the advocate must keep his seven lamps clean and burning brightly. In the centre of these must ever be the lamp of honesty.

    The English Bar is a society of advocates, though, as Blackstone tells us, we generally call them counsel. The Scots retain the name in their Faculty of Advocates. The word must be insisted upon for its ancientry and meaning. The order of advocates is, in D’Aguesseau’s famous phrase, as noble as virtue. Far back in the Capitularies of Charlemagne it was ordained of the profession of advocates that nobody should be admitted therein but men mild, pacific, fearing God, and loving justice, upon pain of elimination. So may it continue, world without end.

    From the earliest, Englishmen have understood that advocacy is necessary to justice, and honesty is essential to advocacy. The thirteenth century Mirrour of Justices may, as modern jurists hold, be a contemptible legal compilation. It is said to have been written by one Andrew Horn, a fishmonger; and what could he have known, say the learned ones, about the origin and history of legal affairs? Nevertheless, to the reader of to-day the views of the man in the street, the common citizen of a bygone age, about the place in the world of the advocate is more precious than many black-letter folios of crabbed juridical learning.

    Some there be, says our fishmonger very shrewdly, "who know not how to state their

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