Transcript

INSTRUCTOR

Open-mindedness is a very important virtue for law and for life. It's quite difficult to be sure that you are being open minded, and it's easy to see other people being closed-minded when they disagree with you.

So one of the ways in which I've been encouraging students to think about it is by reference to a Scottish politician, Jennie Lee, who was really the founder of The Open University. She created The Open University when she was a minister in Harold Wilson's government. But as a student in Edinburgh in the 1920s, she studied education, literature, history, psychology, and law. It was a little bit like an Open University course in a way.

And you had to do a little project. In psychology she did it. And I've got her handwriting here because it's from the archives of The Open University. And it's called 'An Experiment in Prejudices.' And what she did was to ask - because she was also studying to be a teacher, studying education - she asked 5 groups of 45 children in different parts of Scotland what they thought of other nations. She gave a list of the nations of the world, and she got them to say what they thought.

And some of them didn't like the Chinese. Some didn't like the Russians. Some didn't like the Germans. Some didn't like the Japanese. But it was quite varied. And she said that was an experiment in prejudices. And that word, prejudice, obviously comes from prejudging. And so for lawyers, it's a good way of remembering don't prejudge based on your prejudice, but keep as much as you can an open mind.

And she said of the 222 children that she asked, only two put that they didn't know enough to make a comment that was fair on people from these different nations. And she thought in a sense that was the right answer. But she wasn't blaming the children. She was saying that the culture affects the way in which we think about people from different nations.

Now I could give lots of different examples of this quest for open-mindedness. As an English lawyer, I've got great respect for Scottish lawyers. And in particular, I'm aware that the great so-called English judges often turn out to be Scottish.

So Lord Mansfield in the 18th century is regarded as the epitome of the legal system of England and Wales, of which he was Lord Chief Justice. But in fact he was Scottish. His name is William Murray. And he was considered to be very open-minded. For instance, he had the illegitimate daughter of a nephew in his household, and this young woman was black. He released a slave in a famous case and he was considered to be liberal towards Catholics, for which - speaking here as a Catholic - for which he suffered. His home was burned down in the Gordon Riots, and they burned his library. But he had the open-mindedness all the way through.

And Lord Denning once gave a lecture in which he said these great judges from Scotland have illuminated English law even though there was prejudice against them. The English weren't open-minded to them. They criticised William Murray's appointment. Then he was followed by Lord Campbell, then Lord Blackburn. And The Times said, why has this freak appointment been made of another, and I quote, Scotchman? Lord Blackburn, Lord Denning says, but he became the greatest judge of the 19th century.

We go right the way through to the days when I was a student in the 1970s. At the end of that, Mrs. Thatcher got elected. And later in her time as prime minister, she appointed a Scottish judge, Lord Mackay. And he went to the funeral of a couple of Catholic judges. And for that, the Free Presbyterian Church, in which he'd been born and which he's an elder, expelled him because it was seen as being supportive of the Catholic Church, to which they were opposed. But his argument was, I'm being supportive of my colleagues.

So right the way through 300 years of thinking about law, it is important to strive to be open-minded, to wait until you know the facts and the law, and to make your judgement as much as you can on the facts and the law, not on some preconception of what other people are like.