Episode 04 - Why Law?

Gate 14. Delayed. A colleague I have known for perhaps forty minutes asks the question people

always ask eventually, usually somewhere between the second drink and the boarding call.

So why Law?

It is a generous question. It assumes there was a decision. Before the law, I was a fashion photographer. Before that — or possibly during, the chronology has softened — a graphic designer. There was a brief and improbable period in champagne, which sounds far more glamorous than it was and which I mention mainly because it is the only line on the list that ever gets a reaction. My father wanted me to be a civil engineer. I went to university to study business.

I hated business. That is the whole of it, really. Not a calling. Not a documentary watched at fifteen that lit some quiet fire. A list of things I tried and put down, and one thing I picked up and didn't.

Now, there is a version of this story that works much better, and I have told it. It goes like this. Photography teaches you framing; what you leave outside the edge of the picture is a decision, and it is usually the decision that matters. Design teaches you that an argument nobody can follow is not an argument. Champagne teaches you that you are always selling something, and that people buy the occasion rather than the thing. Business teaches you the machinery underneath the institutions everyone else describes in the abstract. Put them together and you have, more or less, a description of what I do now. Frame the case. Make it legible. Understand what is actually being bought. Know how the machine works.

It's a good paragraph. I've watched it land at dinners. It is also entirely constructed backwards. None of those things were preparation. They were jobs I was not especially good at and did not intend to leave in the direction I left them. The coherence arrived years later, retrospectively, assembled out of whatever was lying around, which is, I suspect, how most people's coherence arrives. We are all reverse-engineering a straight line out of a set of accidents and then presenting it as a plan. The performance is so routine that we forget we are performing it, and then we sit on interview panels and ask young people to do the same trick, and mark them down when they can't.

My father, for his part, was not being unreasonable. He wanted me to build things that stay up. I have thought about that more than he'd probably like. Two and a half decades in international criminal law and public international law is, on the balance of the evidence, a career spent watching things not stay up. Institutions built with enormous ceremony and then quietly starved. Tribunals that close before they finish. Judgments that are correct and unenforced. Whatever a bridge is, this is the opposite of it.

He came round, eventually. I'm not sure he was wrong. The actual answer, the one under the anecdote, is that in the second term of a business degree I did not want, there was a law module. And in that module, for the first time in my education, I encountered the proposition that a person could simply be wrong, and that you could demonstrate it. Not out-argue them. Not out-charm them. Demonstrate it, from the text, to a standard, in front of someone whose job was to say so.

I had never met anything like that before. I have not really got over it.

Everything since has been a long argument with how rarely that turns out to be true in practice.

So: not a vocation. An elimination. I did not choose law so much as run out of alternatives, and

law happened to be standing nearest the exit.

Which brings me to the only piece of advice I'd offer, and it is faintly ungracious. Be a little suspicious of the ones who knew at seventeen.

Certainty that early is usually inherited, and inherited certainty doesn't survive contact with the work. The people I have come to rely on, the ones still standing after twenty years of adjournments, funding cuts, and clients who lie to you for reasons you eventually understand, mostly wandered in sideways. Arriving by accident and staying anyway is the better credential. Anyone can start. Almost nobody explains why they stayed.

They're boarding. More from the next one.