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 apprenticeship 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
