Over the 116 years of the Bar Council’s existence, the Bar has undergone a great deal of change. Of course, the Bar itself has a far longer history, and, like any entity that has a long history, it has evolved. And, in the past fifty years, it has grown exponentially – from under 2000 practising barristers in 1960, it has swelled to some 15,000 in 2010. This is, I think, symptomatic of the national explosion in prosperity, and therefore in the professional and other reasonably well off classes in that period. That growth raises serious questions about the next fifty years. In particular, how do we manage financial and social expectations, given that this rate of growth, in the prosperous middle classes generally, and the size of the bar in particular, is most unlikely to continue.
