Journalists may soon need law degree to report on Supreme Court (of India) writes
LiveMint.com:
"The Supreme Court [of India] can bar any correspondent from coverage without offering any reasons under the new rules.
Issued
by the court on Saturday, the norms require that permanent and
temporary accredited print journalists have a professional law degree
and at least seven years of experience. Electronic media reporters need,
apart from the law degree, at least three-and-a-half-years of
experience. The circular did not set a deadline for the norms to come
into force. Court officials didn’t throw light on when the circular would come into effect, when asked on Tuesday.
The new norms follow instances in which faults were found in coverage."
If
the Supreme Court of the United States did not have to abide by
extremely stiff free speech requirements in the USA, a similar rule
in America would be tempting for some observers and judges.
Supreme
Court decisions are not amenable to coverage like sports events, where
one need not have been an athlete oneself to be a good sports
journalist. However, the accurate coverage of "legal events" requires a great
deal of fundamental legal knowledge and legal practice. In the United
States, there is no question that the best coverage of U.S. Supreme
Court decisions comes almost exclusively from writers who have law
degrees.
Adam Liptak,
the U.S. Supreme Court correspondent of The New York Times, is a good
example, having obtained both an undergraduate degree in English and a
professional degree in law (both at Yale University), and also having
practiced as a lawyer subsequently, specializing in First Amendment
matters. In addition,
Liptak also lectures on journalism. He is so good at what he does for a reason:
specialized legal and language education AND relevant legal and journalistic experience.
The
accreditation of journalists for Supreme Court reporting is not as easy
a free speech issue as one might think. After all, the Supreme Court
freely determines which lawyers can appear before it and has a lot of
clout in its rules about how things are to be done. After all, if you
limit
accredited Supreme Court
reporting to experienced journalists with law degrees, you are not
limiting WHAT they report, but you are placing quality qualifications on
who may be accredited by the Court to do so. This by the way, would not
prohibit anyone else from writing about Supreme Court decisions, but
they could not get accreditation.
The trouble with
that kind of a solution is that it ignores the fact that modern
litigation can impact many specialized areas of human endeavor about
which law-trained journalist may not necessarily have any specialized
knowledge: Information Technology, Telecommunications, Engineering,
Genetics,
Bioscience,
Chemistry, Physics, etc. What then?
On
the other hand, we are the first to criticize the Federal Circuit in
the USA, where judges are chosen because of educational backgrounds that
combine law with other
disciplines
such as engineering. We think that this HAS NOT led to better judging.
Quite the contrary, such judges appear to us sometimes to be unable to
shake their science and technology-oriented backgrounds in making
judicial decisions and writing their opinions from the standpoint of THE
LAW. We see this especially in the Federal Circuit's historically
disastrous decisions and opinions in patent law, where the Federal
Circuit seems to side with inventors as fellow engineering and
technology travelers.
At the same time, we find too large a percentage of the people who are elected to Congress to be woefully
underqualified
for their elevated positions, and their legislative work shows it.
Could we demand that everyone elected to Congress be required have a law
degree? Would that be unconstitutional? Surely yes, without a
Consitutional amendment -- the Constitution can and does impose qualification requirements on Senators and Representatives.
Would Congress be a much better place if its members were limited to people with law degrees? We think, yes, but not everyone will agree. Nevertheless, many of extreme proposals circulated in Congress come from people who are not trained in law and who do not seem to understand the federal system that has made America such a great nation. From my point of view as a political centrist, they are disproportionately
clogs and
not cogs in the legislative process, regardless of political party.
We have a similar problem in corporate industries. It used to be that many corporate heads had law degrees. Hence,
CEO's
were acutely aware of not only their powers but also their legal limits.
In recent
decades, however, there has been a trend to more and more people
schooled in business trades taking over the running of corporations, to
the severe detriment of sound corporate governance. Part of this of
course has to do with the rise in importance of
MBAs,
but not only. As corporations have become more and more dependent on
market capitalization as the measure of company performance -- and as
the determinant of corresponding
corporate executive compensation -- the
trend has been to hire
CEOs who "know" the technology of their business, rather than hiring
CEOs
versed in the legal aspects of that business, which are now "farmed out" increasingly to law firms -- another reason why law firms have
become more and more present in the modern economic system.
As written clear back in 2004 at
A Compelling Case for Lawyer-CEOs by Bloomberg Businessweek :
"There was a time in the first half of the 20th
century, before the proliferation of MBA programs, when law school was a
common path for corporate leaders. Since then, attorney-CEOs
have been concentrated in heavily regulated industries -- or to put it
another way, in businesses in which legal issues have a greater effect
on profits than, say, marketing or operations. "
Again,
in terms of corporate governance, the result of this development has
not always been good when seen on a broad national scale. One can in
fact argue that the current Great Recession is one product of hiring the
wrong people to run companies in an erroneously totally self-centered
manner, focusing on profits and ignoring the rule of law.
When
the bottom line is the ONLY consideration, things hit rock bottom. A
business society can only flourish long-term if there are shared values
and strict rules for business. Historically, for example, the
Hanseatic League was a model of success through business cooperation and
rulemaking.
It imploded after hundreds of years of success because of members
started to put self-interest above the community interest of the League.
Internal struggles and bickering did the rest, which is one reason to
view with great trepidation the extremist polarization in the United
States, which does not bide well for the country long-term.
In
any case, the fundamental idea of requiring -- formally or informally
-- a legal background for many important activities in society is
certainly desirable, especially in terms of corporate governance, and,
yes, even for law journalism.
In fact, demanding certain educational requirements for certain
positions
is certainly essential -- just think of medical doctors (physicians).
We do not allow lawyers to perform surgical operations in hospitals.
People should think about that when electing medical people to legislate
law in Congress, which might not be a good idea, objectively seen.
Nevertheless, one has to leave a door open for free access, as in sports, for the "walk-
ons",
and in science, for the unplanned geniuses. Law must also leave the
door open for comment or criticism by outsiders, and that is also the
case for the academic world, which is guided by the dogmas of the
various professions, not all of which are immune to criticism and most
of which are subject to improvement.
Hence, we have to put up with those less qualified than they should be. That is also a part of the system.
