Speaking at a family law conference in London on Tuesday, Lord Sumption rubbished an ‘excessively specialised approach’ to legal practice, insisting that all areas of law are interconnected and that lawyers need broad-based training to match. ‘No area of law is completely self-contained,’ he argued, addressing family law directly as a particularly insular practice area. ‘Family law, like contract law, tax law, insolvency law or almost any other kind of law, has to be applied to a variety of different kinds of property and legal rights,’ he said, adding that the ‘instincts’ of family law were increasingly intersecting with those of common law in ways historically unprecedented – for example, through the emergence of nuptial contracts. Cross-fertalisation between different areas of law will require flexibility on the part of practitioners, he argued: ‘I have always been of the opinion that legal specialisations are essentially bogus. At the bar, I liked to trespass on other people’s cabbage patches. As a judge I do it most of the time.’
The full details of Lord Sumption’s speech can be found on Legal Futures.
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