ABSTRACT
Even in the present situation there is no moral or practical reason why every student who requires a pupillage should not have one, and a welter of reasons why they should. The Bar, through its collegiate bodies and through the Bar Council, has invited them to invest a crucial year of their lives and money which most of them do not have in the first stage of vocational training. It does not, and cannot, promise them eventual work; but it has an inescapable moral obligation not to arbitrarily deny any of them the second stage of a barrister's vocational training, pupillage, without which none of them can ever seek work at the Bar. There are enough qualified junior counsel to take the BVC's annual throughput, yet probably fewer than 800 of them in this year will take on a pupil,lo a large proportion of them unfunded or underfunded.
