This book has accounted for the role of masculinity in shaping the white-collar professional. Many facets of the legal profession prior to World War II likewise characterized the profession after the war, including a deep valuation of the past and the marginalization of women and people of color among the ranks of practicing barristers.

This book considers professional culture in relation to place and affect. All law students from across Britain and its empire had to train in London at four legal societies known as the Inns of Court. Unlike other professions that underwent systematic reforms, the Inns of Court remained guild-like associations that offered no systematic training. Instead of inculcating legal knowledge, the societies relied on affective rituals to create a sense of belonging among members—or, conversely, to marginalize those who did not fit the profession’s ideals. This book examines the societies’ active efforts to maintain an exclusive and masculine culture in the face of sweeping social, political, and demographic changes across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The second chapter considers the Inns of Court in their relationship to the broader city, both the people who lived, worked, or visited central London and the governing bodies responsible for regulating the capital. The chapter highlights the societies’ struggle to maintain their local autonomy while fulfilling obligations to the public good and, increasingly, to public opinion. The Inns were geographically and legally separate from the rest of the capital, but they connected with the central London populace via efforts to promote citizens’ physical, moral, and cultural well-being. At the same time, the societies clashed with newly created, centralized metropolitan bodies designed to order the metropolis in the name of public health. Disputes between the Inns and entities like the Metropolitan Board of Works represented a conflict between an ancient system of local authority and processes of urban rationalization, a tension that defined metropolitan modernity in Britain. As competing strains within liberalism pushed institutions to engage in philanthropy in ways that could undermine institutional authority, the Inns found themselves unable to fully salvage their autonomy.

Victorian MPs debated whether or not the Inns of Court adequately governed the bar and effectively trained their members. The societies defended themselves from parliamentary assaults by insisting that legal etiquette ensured the gentlemanly character of the bar. This chapter examines disciplinary hearings for violations of etiquette at the Inns to consider the societies’ direct assertions of their authority over the operations of the legal profession. In the nineteenth century, breaches of legal etiquette largely pertained to ungentlemanly behavior, such as engaging in trade. In the geopolitical context of the early twentieth century, however, faced with members holding new radical political commitments, the societies overlaid concerns about gentlemanliness with worries over personal political expression and national loyalty. The societies manipulated legal etiquette to deliberately excuse or disbar members for similar offenses along lines that accorded more with members’ seeming Britishness or foreignness than with the legality or illegality of their actions.

This chapter considers how and why the societies resisted women even after their admission to the Inns in 1919 and the strategies women law students and barristers deployed to navigate the resolutely masculine culture of the Inns. It argues that beyond their gender, women’s political commitments and social networks mitigated the degree of acceptance or resistance they faced from members of the societies. The chapter also examines the Inns’ fraught reconciliation of the societies’ concerns about overseas students with the new presence of women in their common rooms, gardens, and halls. It considers the complicated mapping of intersectional identities onto the existing culture of the Inns and traces how members of the Inns manipulated space to privilege, protect, include, or exclude female members, colonial members, or female colonial members.

This chapter examines the Inns’ largest and most on-going source of concern regarding radical politics, Indian nationalists, whom the Inns sometimes conflated with Indian students more generally. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, men from throughout the empire, but in greatest number from India, came to London to study law. By the early twentieth century, burgeoning colonial nationalist movements gained visibility for their causes, sometimes through violent actions in the colonies or in London. Members of the Inns came to distrust the potentially radical politics of their overseas members, equating all imperial subjects with anti-British actions. The societies collaborated with the British government to consider quotas limiting the number of Indian students in London. They debated whether or not colonial students were capable of being trained to be self-regulating subjects who would willingly submit to and replicate existing structures of power.

This chapter examines how, particularly in response to their growing middle-class population, the Inns of Court relied on their architectural spaces and social practices to ensure that all members of the bar embodied the ideal of the gentlemanly professional. In the absence of required classes, the societies stressed fraternization with older generations to inculcate new members with legal knowledge and the values appropriate to British barristers. The societies emphasized affective bonds and tried to cultivate fraternal relationships between their members. Yet in the mid-nineteenth century, the category of gentlemanliness was itself in flux, subject to divergent ideas of who could be a gentleman and how a gentleman should behave. Competing ideas of who belonged at the societies or what counted as gentlemanly behavior could result in unanticipated affective registers, including anger, indignation, and shame.

An overview of the organization of the British legal profession, courts of law, and the processes required to become a barrister or solicitor.