barrister

Barrister is derived from Middle English barre (a bar, a railing, a barrier) plus the suffix -ister (a person associated with), on the model of words like chorister and sophister. The bar that names the barrister was a physical object in medieval English courts: a wooden railing or barrier that separated the area of the court reserved for judges, clerks, and professional lawyers from the area where clients, spectators, and unqualified persons stood. To be 'called to the bar' was to be formally admitted past this railing into the professional area — a ceremony that the Inns of Court (the professional associations of English barristers) still perform in elaborated ritual form. The word barrister entered English in the sixteenth century as the specific term for a lawyer who had been so called and who was therefore qualified to argue cases in the superior courts.

The English legal profession developed a distinctive split structure that is largely unique in the world: barristers, who argue cases in court, and solicitors, who advise clients, prepare cases, and handle transactional work. A person with a legal problem in England approaches a solicitor, who prepares the matter and, when court advocacy is required, instructs a barrister. The barrister's client relationship is mediated through the solicitor; a barrister was for most of legal history unable to deal directly with lay clients at all (this has since been substantially modified). The division of the profession reflects historical accident — the development of two distinct professional bodies with different training, different associations, and different court rights — rather than logical necessity, since most other legal systems manage with a unified profession.

The Inns of Court — Lincoln's Inn, Gray's Inn, the Inner Temple, and the Middle Temple — are the ancient professional societies that have regulated admission to the bar in England since the fourteenth century. They are not law schools in the modern sense but membership organizations that historically provided both education and a social community for aspiring barristers. The requirement of 'keeping terms' — eating a prescribed number of formal dinners in the Inn's hall — was for centuries the primary qualification for call to the bar, and it persists in modified form today. The physical and social structures of the Inns — their ancient halls, their collective dining, their rituals of call — reflect the medieval origins of the barrister as a professional person embedded in a specific physical and institutional space.

Barristers in England and Wales wear distinctive professional dress in court: a wig and gown that are survivals of eighteenth-century formal attire, maintained as symbols of the profession's antiquity and its separation from ordinary commercial life. The wig — made of horsehair, in styles that vary by seniority — was adopted from the fashion of the Restoration court in the 1660s and has been maintained by the legal profession long after it disappeared from every other context. Proposals to abolish court dress have periodically been made and periodically resisted; the wigs persist as a marker of the profession's identity and its claim to historical continuity with the English common law tradition. The bar that once divided a medieval courtroom still divides the legal profession from everyone else — the wig is the flag of that division.