cover layouts 29/9/03 2:27 pm Page 1 gender in|justice ⁄ 5129 NEW G-injustice - A/W 18/4/08 1:40 PM Page 1 Gender InJustice Feminising the Legal Professions? ⁄ ⁄ Trinity College Dublin Law School, 2003 ISBN No. 0-9534979-1-7 The authors retain copyright but this document may be copied or reproduced without further permission for your own use, provided the source is properly acknowledged. 5129 NEW G-injustice - A/W 18/4/08 1:40 PM Page 2 Acknowledgements This publication, and the research project upon which it is based, would not have been possible without the contributions of many individuals, not all of whom can be named here, but to all of whom we are very grateful. Our Administrator, Catherine Finnegan, of Trinity College Dublin Law School, deserves our special gratitude for all her hard work, since without her the research would have run aground very quickly. We are particularly grateful to President Mary McAleese and Baroness Helena Kennedy QC for their support. The project was funded by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform under the Equality for Women Measure of the Regional Operational Programmes of the National Development Plan, 2000-2006. Our funders deserve a particularly warm thanks for their understanding and patience, especially those with whom we worked most closely: John O’Callaghan of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, and Camille Loftus of WRC Social and Economic Consultants Ltd (technical support service for the Equality for Women Measure). The British Council gave us immense support and additional funding, and for that we are deeply indebted to Tony Reilly and Angela Crean. Particular thanks are also due to the professional bodies, the Law Society and Bar Council, for their support. We thank our Advisory Board for their input: Judge Susan Denham, Eilis Barry, Caroline Fennell, Ken Murphy and Cathleen O’Neill. We would also like to thank all of those others who contributed in so many ways with helpful suggestions and advice, notably Mary Robinson, Judge Catherine McGuinness, Judge Mella Carroll and Judge Mary Finlay Geoghegan. We are grateful to our chief research assistant on the statistical side, Caroline Roughneen, and our other invaluable research assistants: Clare Bertrand, Catherine Healy, Karina Murski, Jennifer Roberts, Barbara Salmon and Andrea Wollstein. We are also grateful to the Data Entry Bureau, and to those in different Law Schools who assisted us by distributing questionnaires to their students, and providing us with information about staff numbers and gender breakdown: Peggy O’Rourke at TCD, Dr. Fergus Ryan at DIT, and the law faculties at NUI Galway and UCC. Many others worked with us in other capacities, including Amy Hayes and Kelly McCabe of the Law School; and Aidan Brophy, our accountant, to all of whom we owe sincere thanks. Thanks are due to all of those who took part in interviews and focus groups, those who responded to our letters relating to the structure of solicitors’ firms; and those who provided information on briefing practices, particularly James Hamilton, the 5129 NEW G-injustice - A/W 18/4/08 1:40 PM Page 3 Director of Public Prosecutions. We are very grateful to those from many other countries who assisted us by providing access to comparative literature. We owe thanks to Margaret Magennis and the Northern Ireland Association of Women Solicitors for their help at an early stage of the research; and to the Committee of the Irish Women Lawyers’ Association, for their support throughout the lengthy process. David Joyce and Derval Concannon from Language deserve special thanks for their creative input, wonderful cover design and hard work on design and layout of the report. Other individuals helped us in many different ways. Twinkle Egan BL has done a great deal of pioneering research work, and we owe her particular gratitude, not least because she suggested that we apply for funding for this project in the first place. Jennefer Aston, Consultant Librarian to the Bar Council, was extremely helpful and gave us a great deal of her time; Dr. Susan Parkes, Elizabeth Gleeson, Norah Kelso and Jean O’Hara of Trinity College Dublin; Jerry Carroll, Director of the Bar Council; Veronica Donnelly and Margaret Byrne of the Law Society; Marcella Higgins at the King’s Inns; Maura Butler of the Law Society; John Foley and Magdalen O’Connell of the National University of Ireland Archives; Vivien Barror of the Judicial Support Unit of the Courts service. Finally, we owe especially grateful thanks to all of those lawyers who contributed anonymously by returning completed questionnaires. Their input has enabled us to provide for the first time a detailed and, we hope, relatively comprehensive overview of the experiences, attitudes and lives of Irish lawyers, both women and men. Any errors or inaccuracies in the text are of course our own. We have endeavoured to provide an accurate overview of relevant statistics, laws and policies as at 1st October, 2003. 5129 NEW G-injustice - A/W 18/4/08 1:40 PM Page 4 The Authors Ivana Bacik, LL.B., LL.M. (Lond), B.L., is a member of the Irish and English Bars and a practising barrister in Dublin. She is Reid Professor of Criminal Law, Criminology and Penology at Trinity College Dublin, and taught previously at the University of Kent, the University of North London and the National College of Ireland. She is co- author of Abortion and the Law (Kingston and Whelan with Bacik, Dublin, Round Hall, 1997) and co-editor of Crime and Poverty in Ireland (Bacik and O’Connell (eds), Dublin, Round Hall, 1998). She co-ordinated an EU-funded study on rape law in different European jurisdictions, The Legal Process and Victims of Rape (Bacik, Maunsell and Gogan, Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, 1998), and is co-author of Towards a Culture of Human Rights in Ireland (Bacik and Livingstone, Cork University Press, 2001). She has contributed chapters on sentencing practice and on women and criminal law to the major Irish criminological text, O’Mahony (ed), Criminal Justice in Ireland (IPA, 2002). She has carried out consultancy and training work in Europe and internationally with the Council of Europe, the British Council and the International Labour Organisation (ILO). She has been Editor of the Irish Criminal Law Journal since 1997. Cathryn Costello, B.C.L., (N.U.I.), LL.M. (Bruges), B.L. (Honorable Society of King’s Inns). Cathryn Costello holds law degrees from University College, Cork, the College of Europe, Bruges and the Honorable Society of King’s Inns. In October 2003, she took up a Fellowship in Public and EC Law at Worcester College, Oxford. Prior to this she was Lecturer in European Law since 1998 at the Law School, Trinity College Dublin, where she taught the mandatory general course on EU law as well as advanced courses in various other aspects of EU law and WTO law. Her areas of EU law specialisation include fundamental rights and equality law, the judicial system, and the development of common immigration and asylum policy. Since 2000, she has also held the position of Director of the Irish Centre for European Law, where she is responsible for organising an extensive conference and research programme. She has published extensively in the equality field, and has co-edited a major volume on the new EC equality directives (Costello and Barry (eds) Equality in Diversity: The New Equality Directives (Dublin, ICEL No 29, 2003). 5129 NEW G-injustice - A/W 18/4/08 1:40 PM Page 5 Eileen Drew, BA, M.Sc. Dip MIS, Ph.D, with degrees from Trinity College Dublin and the University of Bradford, was elected to Fellowship of Trinity College Dublin in 1999. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Statistics and Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at Trinity College, where she teaches in the areas of Women, Work and Employment and Data Analysis. She has undertaken extensive research using national and EU data sets. This includes an examination of Gender and Part- time Working in Ireland and other EU countries, the issue of Low Pay for Women Workers, Integration of Women into the Irish Labour Market and an international Comparative Leadership Survey of women and men in 27 industrialised countries. Recent publications include Off the Treadmill: Achieving Work Life Balance (Family Friendly Framework Committee 2003), Gender Equality in the Civil Service (IPA 1999) and Women, Work and the Family in Europe (Routledge 1998). She is a member of the Executive Committee for the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies and the M. Phil. Programme in Women’s Studies. Her career has included research, training and consultancy in an EU New Opportunities for Women (NOW) project ‘Putting the ‘E’ Into Quality’, with Excellence Ireland, and the EU Leonardo da Vinci Project on ‘Management in the Millennium’. Dr. Drew was appointed to the European Science Foundation Network for Gender Inequality in the New Regional Europe. She is currently engaged in research to increase the representation of Women in Engineering, supported by the Department of Education and Science. 5129 NEW G-injustice - A/W 18/4/08 1:40 PM Page 6 Dedication To the early women pioneers who used their hard-acquired professional knowledge and placed their faith in the transformative potential of litigation, confrontation and agitation, this study is dedicated. 5129 NEW G-injustice - A/W 18/4/08 1:40 PM Page 7 Contents Preface by President Mary McAleese pg 9 Introduction pg 29 Chapter 1 Setting the Scene – From Pioneers to Presidents pg 40 Chapter 2 Literature on Lawyers – A Comparative