At the Inns of Court, those venerable London institutions that controlled admission to practice at the bar, the criteria for acceptance and success were adherence to the codes of behavior of a British gentleman, not knowledge of the law or practical expertise. As Ren Pepitone explains, the latter competencies could be acquired elsewhere, while the Inns served as the institutional bulwark of an intangible but crucial aspect of patriarchal culture. By adapting to external pressures when necessary while resisting them as much as possible, the Benchers and members of the Inns maintained those criteria well into the twentieth century (and to some extent until today). Deploying a feminist historical analysis of workplace culture, Pepitone demonstrates the anomalies of educational institutions that declined to teach and professional societies that omitted to certify competence. As one insider of the Inns explained in the 1920s: “These men come here. It is not part of the contract with them that they have to pass their examinations or depart” (144). Pepitone explains what was part of the contract: to absorb and enact codes of etiquette appropriate to the culture of the bar. This explains women’s long exclusion from the profession, since no amount of socialization could render a woman into a gentleman and no other safe way of credentialing barristers could be countenanced. But not all men were malleable. Opinions such as political radicalism and colonial liberation were closely watched, as were habits of dress and diet. Male students from India and other colonies were accepted at the Inns in large numbers, but their lives were carefully regulated and molded. When Gandhi recalled his time at the Inner Temple, he remembered struggling with nonvegetarian fare, acquiring fashionable garments, and concealing aspects of his experience that did not match those of his peers.

Pepitone’s narrative is elegantly organized and tightly argued, driven by her feminist theory of the legal profession as an exclusive brotherhood that was also a workplace culture. By marginalizing male outsiders and all women, the bar defined for the broader culture what law meant and who should control its authority. She begins with a brief and useful “Primer on the Bar” (ix–xv), which succinctly explains the structure of the legal profession and its terminology, institutions, and history. The introductory chapter expounds a wide-ranging theoretical and methodological approach, which draws on sources like fiction and tourist guides as well as private documents and press accounts. Chapter two reveals how creative this approach is, by considering the Inns of Court in spatial terms, notably the relationship of their historic buildings to the geography and institutions of the city of London. Chapter three considers techniques developed for molding middle-class Englishmen into gentlemen-barristers within these spaces, notably by mentorship of younger lawyers by their elders. In Chapter four, Pepitone examines external efforts to regulate the profession and the disciplinary hearings in which errant barristers were charged with breaches of legal etiquette. Chapter five necessarily widens the scope of the study, because in order to practice law in India it was necessary to study in London. While many of the numerous colonial students acquiesced, at least outwardly, in acquiring the brotherly culture, others challenged the structures of power that underpinned it. Following this structured development of her argument, Pepitone’s chapter on women serves as a capstone. Not until 1919 and the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act did the Inns admit women, and then only when required to by Parliament. Even then, they were chary of letting the new students use their hallowed spaces, their common rooms, gardens, and halls. When the women students were also colonial, as Cornelia Sorabji was in the 1920s, the complexities of gender, race, and class were made manifest. A brief Epilogue sketches the fortunes of the Inns of Court after Pepitone’s period, pointing out how such entrenched institutions can resist even the changes that have transpired since 1940.

Pepitone’s study of the culture of the bar demonstrates ambitions that go beyond dissecting a single profession. She offers the book as a methodological model for explaining how other ancient and elite institutions—similarly marked by enduring conservatism—have survived and continue to inform British culture and politics. One strand of this approach is a persistent attention to history and historicism. This appears with respect to the architecture of the Inns: Victorian and Edwardian guidebooks helped visitors properly to appreciate such antiquity and thus taught ordinary citizens to venerate the institutions themselves. Later, postwar reconstruction reiterated the message with neo-Gothic buildings set in secluded gardens. Similarly, the culture based on the generational transfer of norms of masculine behavior was construed as traditional, and therefore inviolable. Colonial subjects were acceptable if they learned to respect their immediate environment, the law it was designed to uphold and enhance, and by extension the politics of class, racial, and gender privilege. History was also the rationale for women’s exclusion—they had never been barristers and hence never should be—and when their inclusion became inevitable, the traditional institutions of sociability remained inhospitable.

That subset of scholars who study women and the legal profession will find Brotherhood of Barristers particularly enlightening, but its argument goes beyond the conventional narrative of gender and exclusion, to locate the problem within the very nature of British society and its connection with the overseas colonies.