Hong Kong's legal profession has undeserved monopoly

Hong Kong's two legal practitioners' guilds have each issued a press release in response to former justice minister Elsie Leung Oi-sie' s recent criticism of the city's legal profession. The press releases, which represent collective intelligence, show dubious polemic standard.

What the Bar Association said about arguments in the law court, that they should be evidence-based reasoning (press release, paragraph 8), is also true for arguments in the court of public opinion. However, neither guild managed to follow this sensible counsel.

Ms Leung observed that legal practitioners' misapprehension of Hong Kong's relationship with Beijing had resulted in the top court's misruling in the Ng Ka-ling case, thus causing the need to seek Beijing's interpretation of the Basic Law with the view to overturning the untenable precedent.

The guilds neither refuted the evidence in Ms Leung's observation nor denied Beijing's authority over constitutional interpretation.

They focused single-mindedly on preaching a post-colonial variant of "judicial independence" which they equated with a dogmatic judiciary which, while dependent on foreign countries for operating doctrines and procedures, is presumably infallible and effectively isolated from the local community.

They disregarded that substantive justice requires an early and thorough remedy in case of a misjudgment.