REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE OPENING OF SEMINAR: “LEGAL EDUCATION AND THE ECONOMY…”
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE OPENING OF SEMINAR: “LEGAL EDUCATION AND THE ECONOMY OF THE FUTURE”
Rector, Deputy Governor, distinguished professors, friends
доброе утро
Good Morning
It is a great pleasure for me to be here today at this great University, and to have the privilege of opening today’s seminar on ‘Legal education and the economy of the future.’ I spent the twenty-two years before becoming President of Ireland in the field of legal education so this is something of a homecoming for me and all the more welcome for that. The broad-spectrum academic accomplishments of FINEC are legendary and they place this University right at the very forefront of the academic and economic development of Russia. It is a formidable responsibility that you shoulder but one you clearly relish. It is after all your chosen vocation and though my own personal vocation has shifted since becoming President to a broader plane, still I know and appreciate this crucial, intriguing link between the economy, the intellectual and professional formation of our lawyers and our society. So this Seminar has me hooked and I cannot tell you how thrilled I am that such a forward looking debate forms part of this first ever visit of an Irish President to the Russian Federation.
This has been a very special week for relations between Ireland and Russia. When I met with President Medvedev yesterday, we were able to celebrate a warm and multifaceted relationship that spans the spectrum of politics and history, literature and culture, the economy and education and importantly we spoke enthusiastically of nurturing and reinforcing and developing the growing links between us.
Many Governments today, including the Irish Government, are making economic recovery a priority. They are focussed on the future and the steps needed to build intelligent, stable economies that benefit all. Your Nobel Prize-winning physicist
Pyotr Kapitsa once said: “People often think it’s he who picks the apple who’s done the main work, but in reality, it’s he who planted the apple tree who has done the main work”. The role of government is to help cultivate the apple orchard, preparing the right soil and supportive environment for the economy itself to grow and develop. In a similar vein, the Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke also famously compared society to a great rooted tree that can take decades to grow to its full strength.
As we look to the apple orchards of the future, in Europe and globally, institutions like FINEC have a vital role to play as the designers, analysers, landscapers, architects and gardeners who will allow us develop strong capacity to resist future shocks and nurture a strong, sustainable and ethically robust economy. The theme of today's seminar, "Legal education and the economy of the future," goes right to the heart of the challenges we face in planning and nurturing those apple orchards.
The first and most obvious sense in which this is true is that businesses are interacting more and more at the international level. As a small open trading economy, Ireland and Irish businesses have first-hand experience of the challenges and opportunities of operating in a global environment with very diverse legal cultures and provisions. Ireland’s membership of the EU provides access to a single market of over 500 million people bringing valuable trade and business opportunities. But EU membership also brought great challenges to the Irish legal profession; as transactions increasingly flowed across national borders, Irish lawyers had to become familiar with international and European Union Law, both gargantuan in scale.
As patron of The Irish Centre for European Law, which was set up in response to the enormous challenge of the EU’s Internal Market programme, I have seen the many benefits that can be reaped by bringing together legal practitioners, academics and representatives of the wide range of business, professional and consumer sectors affected by European Law. I am therefore very interested in the learning opportunities that today’s seminar brings in helping us to prepare our lawyers for the increasingly open and global economy of tomorrow with its hugely complex legal realities.
The recent unsettling period of great economic flux across the world has led to dwindling confidence in financial systems and institutions and has raised questions about how regulation, both nationally and internationally, can be made stronger and more effective to avoid future financial crisis. It was long argued that heavy regulation was not the most conducive environment for business yet as we now know to our great cost, light regulation was a recipe for trouble. If in the future we are to avoid the extremities of economic boom and bust scenarios, we need not only smart, rigorous regulatory systems where the regulator has the necessary powers and competences but, probably of even greater importance, we need professionals who are hard-wired to behave ethically, to respect the requirement of compliance and to consider the longitudinal consequences of their decisions and not just the short-term gains they might make.
Professional formation, in fact personal formation from our earliest days, is part and parcel of reordering our societies and economies nationally and internationally. In order to support a more sustainable and ethically driven economy, legal academics and economists need to work closely together to better understand the technical complexities of international financial systems, to make their operations more transparent to the average citizen and to render their sometimes impenetrable transactions more amenable to effective regulation. They also need to look back at the educational and training processes which equip individuals with the technical and ethical requirements of their profession. I have long been of the view that the teaching of law and our legal rights and responsibilities as citizens should not be kept like some fine vintage wine for the consumption of College students of law but should begin in childhood in our schools and be available to all.
I am delighted that Ireland will have an opportunity to contribute to your deliberations and that my former colleague from Trinity College Dublin Professor Gerard Hogan, a highly esteemed practitioner and academic, will address you later on. We have much to share with each other and to learn from each other and there is no doubt that in terms of legal education, Ireland is an attractive partner for Russian institutions for a number of reasons. We have a highly developed legal system that has much in common with the British and American systems, with the additional European dimension that our EU membership brings and our own Irish jurisprudential flavour. We have internationally recognised Universities that have a long and proud history of legal education and research, as well as decades of experience of interaction with EU and European law. Irish lawyers form a formidable and influential group in the many European political and judicial Institutions where they are renowned not just for their excellence but for the fact that there are so many of them – considerably more than our country’s size would warrant.
Legal education was traditionally concerned with serving the legal profession and enabling it to carry out activities in areas such as the buying and selling of property, commercial relations and criminal and family matters. Today’s globalised world makes considerably wider demands as lawyers champion human rights, safeguard intellectual property rights, unravel the legal elements of environmental issues and medical and technological developments, safeguard transnational commercial and private transactions, provide advocacy for defendants across jurisdictions, draft international laws and treaties and a whole raft of things which nationally and internationally need the help and expertise of lawyers. The law makers and practitioners of today need levels of intellectual literacy and sensitivity which are considerable. In the context of your discussion today there is a clear need for a sophisticated level of economic, ethical and technological literacy which has not always been available in traditional legal education. What is more, it is very clear that an educated and inquiring international outlook is more likely to develop the national and international capacity to construct the most effective legal solutions to the challenges facing us.
In that regard there is a lot to be gained by an embedded practice of regular and sustained exchanges between educational establishments in different jurisdictions, and by the combining of the study of business and law with language skills. It is very reassuring to see these things already happening for some years now in Irish Universities and, of course, particularly exciting in the context of Irish-Russian mutuality is the signing of an agreement of cooperation between the Dublin Institute of Technology and FINEC last November. Wherever there is easy fluent cooperation, there is a real chance that all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of knowledge and wisdom and experience and insight will get matched up and put in the right place. Without that cooperation, my piece stays in my pocket and your piece of the puzzle stays in yours and we may never get to see the whole picture.
Events like today’s seminar show that you in FINEC are committed to active multidisciplinary, transnational engagement - exactly the approach and mind-set that is now needed to succeed in a global and technically complex age. I wish you well in educating the lawyers and economists and sociologists who will shape your future and our future and I very much look forward to further Irish involvement and partnership in FINEC’s international outreach programme. For 80 years, you have nurtured leaders in many fields. I congratulate you on your 80th anniversary later this year. I am confident that FINEC’s high standards and admirable capacity to evolve and adapt mean that the next 80 years will see a flourishing garden because of the care in planting you are taking today. And I look forward to Irish institutions developing closer links of friendship and partnership with FINEC and being an important part of your story in the years ahead.
Спасибо. Thank You.