Re SCALES:
A personal reflection on a great idea,
on the occasion of the 10th Anniversary Celebration
Friday, 21 September 2007
Ralph Simmonds
Emeritus Professor of Law, Murdoch University
Justice, Supreme Court of Western Australia
Formerly, Dean and Professor Law Murdoch University
Introduction
I am delighted to help SCALES celebrate its tenth year of operation. I want to share some memories of it, what I think it has meant to the law in Western Australia and Australia and to me. I do regret I was unable to be present on the occasion to give these remarks and congratulate individually all of those concerned who were able to attend.
First I need to address the matter of origins.
Success has many parents; failure is an orphan. SCALES can boast a proliferation of parentage claimants. But I am here to establish true parentage.
I am pleased to confirm that SCALES’s true parents are Chris Shanahan, SC (as he now most deservedly is), and Archie Zariski (now of Edmonton, Alberta and of flying and all too brief visits to this State for ADR education purposes).
Midwives were the late and much loved Roger Lethbridge, one of the senior administrators of Murdoch University at the time; Kim Beazley (the younger and retiring one) and Michael Lavarch (as then Federal Attorney General); and Daryl Williams, QC (as Michael Lavarch’s successor).
Mere Deans – myself, when the idea was brought into the world by Chris and Archie; Michael Blakeney, for the negotiations to make it healthy and to launch it; and then me again, to help SCALES fight the good fight (sometimes in the lists as SCALES v Simmonds; but more on that later) – were carried along, struck to varying degrees by the extraordinary passion, energy, discipline and devotion SCALES inspired in those who worked for and in it.
So what has SCALES amounted to?
SCALES the local hero
I call this section of these remarks “SCALES the local hero” because I want to capture what SCALES did locally for the School of Law at Murdoch, and for the University.
SCALES proved that you really can do something for the first time. Clinical legal education had a history in this state of a hand to mouth existence, outside the curriculum, surviving on the goodwill of overstretched members of the profession and the idealism of law students cutting classes and some curricular corners to provide services to the community.
Compare that with the (viewed from here) richly endowed law clinics at the major US law schools, and their much smaller cousins at UNSW and Monash, most notably, all integrated into the academic curriculum.
As a third wave law school, Murdoch had very little to lose in getting into clinical legal education in a substantial way, putting it into the curriculum, staffing it with academic appointments, and finding it a community location outside the rather more affluent places in which University campuses in Perth are, by and large, located.
There was, however, the small matter of money. Clinical legal education is expensive, in money, other treasure, and sweat. It is simply not worth doing without significant expenditure of all three sorts, where that expenditure will be sustained over time.
Which is where Roger Lethbridge, Murdoch University, and the Commonwealth, through Kim Beazley and Michael Lavarch, initially, then Daryl Williams, QC, came in.
The law school was shameless. We got all of them in, and tried it to make it impossible for them ever to leave. And, astoundingly, if not always obviously, we largely succeeded. Note the heavy qualifications, however. Which takes me to the national stage.
SCALES the national player
SCALES also became a national force. The Commonwealth drew on its experience with SCALES to trial a national model for community law centres associated with universities.
I have no idea what has happened to the idea. Others can tell me whether or not SCALES has prospered for that reason.
But it is self-evidently the case, for me, that the School of Law and the University have benefited from being associated with SCALES. Perhaps it is because of the great acronym. (Another superb idea of the hugely creative Chris Shanahan.) Perhaps it is because of the transcendentally self-promotional proclivities of the SCALES people.
That is, if you’re doing it, talk about it, early, loudly and often.
Of course that could make life hard for a Dean trying to manage resources in the hugely demanding environment of recent times.
I have abiding memories of exquisitely involved negotiations with SCALES about accepting more students and drawing in more funding. The rewards were great, however. Even if they sometimes exhausted the SCALES administrators, and me, in more ways than one.
So what was in SCALES for me?
SCALES and me
I never got to work in SCALES, although I had planned to do so after leaving the Deanship. Before other things came up.
I have to admit to being a student idealist for clinical legal education from 1970. Michael Barker now the Hon Justice Barker of the Supreme Court and President of the State Administrative Tribunal and I wrote a paper for a conference of Australian, New Zealand and Asian law students hosted by the University of Singapore, and published as “Equal Protection and Problems of the Poor” (1971) 3 Singapore Law Journal 1 – 20. There we extolled the virtues of tapping the enthusiasms and energies of law students, in an educationally sound and civically rewarding setting, of the sort a law clinic associated with a university might represent. Our half-formed ideas did not get far at UWA then.
But look at SCALES now.
For me SCALES was a proof that you can go home again.
If only (now) vicariously, at events like this one.
I wish SCALES all the very best for its next ten years.
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