Law and literature: beginning again

I have spent most of my time in academia, but most of my life in libraries. I was elected an Early Career Fellow at an Oxbridge College and now I lecture. I’ve been lucky. I grew up on a council estate in a single parent family and went to one of the worst schools in the country. It was eventually closed for good. Good. This isn’t a sob story though. ‘Went’, for one, is not quite right. Most of the time I pretended to go to school. I went to the large local library where I was very happy, and it was easy to get lost.

As an academic, I’ve done what you’re supposed to do. I wrote my first book (I’m at work on the second), published articles, given talks, taught students and visited research libraries across the world in search of manuscripts. Imagine making a city like Waco your home for a month, and when a friendly local asks ‘what brings you here?’, explaining, in the quiet of a local bar, that you have come to Texas to read the correspondence of a forgotten Victorian with a taste for Shakespeare and Romantic poetry; you can find the letters in the library up the road where there is a replica of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s salon on the second floor. Scholars and the things they study can end up in the strangest places.

But I want a change. I have decided to become a barrister. I made the decision during a class a couple of years ago. I was teaching Thomas Gray, and it was spring. After we had read the ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, I quoted William Empson: ‘what is said [by Gray] is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that any improvement of society could prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy’. The moment grabbed my throat. One will always waste oneself but be sure to choose the wasting. I want to do it differently.

I have kept my barrister dream a secret. It was an ambition that life kept kicking aside. I wasn’t brave enough to pick it up although it had been there since I was a boy; those Rumpole and Roger Thursby stories, either could be my Mastermind subject. I tried to read William Blackstone and worked my way through the Notable British Trials series. I searched for the lives of advocates and judges. I read chaotically (often the best way) anything I could find. But in that public library I did not know which way to go. I wanted to study both literature and the law. I had been raised on stories of my great-grandfather – a barrister and war hero. His uncle had been a High Court Judge in India and a mentor (perhaps more) of Cornelia Sorabji, a social reformer and the first woman to study law at Oxford. She was with him when he died. (I’d like to write a book about them.) While the stories inspired me, they seemed too remote. It all seemed too exotic, too heady. So, I read English Literature. I loved and love it.

Cut to now. Universities are struggling, and my subject is under threat. Academia wanes, but that is too big and sad a story. This leap into law is not, however, something I feel I can share with my colleagues. It would be seen as a betrayal, but it is not. The academic world is no longer what it was, nor what I was promised, and I am making preparations to leave. Is moving from literature to the law at this stage in my life too big a risk? Yes, of course, and yet, not really. Literature and the law are not as far apart as they may at first seem.

The greatest living lexicographer, Bryan A Garner, began his career cutting his teeth on Shakespearean linguistics. The man whom David Foster Wallace called a ‘genius’ writes better than anyone about legal language. His literary training enabled him to bring principles of clarity and order to the editing of Black’s Law Dictionary. With Antonin Scalia, he wrote Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts – an attempt to explain and justify the principles that guide textualism. Garner often draws parallels: ‘In the field of literature, T S Eliot warned about literary critics who forget that they are dealing with a text and instead find in a work such as Hamlet “a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization”’. I tell my students to read The Elements of Legal Style. The introduction, ‘The Letters of the Law’, is a brilliant discussion of rhetorical method.

Garner has shown me just how useful all those experiments in lecturing and giving papers have been. I have tried to peer over the shoulders of dead poets to watch poems move through false starts, cancellations and dead-ends to settle, or not, into something approaching a final shape. I have made the case for this or that text and attempted to justify my textual principles. Manuscripts have trained me in a kind of ‘severe attention’, to borrow a phrase from Percy Bysshe Shelley.

That same poet had something to say about the relationship between law and literature too. In ‘A Defence of Poetry’, he declared that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. The pronouncement demands strong reactions. If quoted, it is often to be clung to, perhaps savaged or derided as so much wishful thinking, as with W H Auden’s ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. Yet, as a statement, it has become oddly prophetic of Shelley’s own case. Legislators (who once had a weakness for literary quotation) did read him: Gladstone, Disraeli, take your pick.

Whatever today’s legislators make of Shelley’s boast, advocates have tended to acknowledge their poets. Keir Starmer may have opted for a ‘big atlas, with real details’ for his desert island reading, but Lord Denning wanted Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and John Mortimer went for The Oxford Book of English Verse (Arthur Quiller-Couch edition). Horace Rumpole, who knew his ‘old sheep of the Lake District’ by heart, would have wanted the same with perhaps a tad more Wordsworth. Those barristers said to have inspired the Old Bailey hack preferred others. For Jeremy Hutchinson, it was Thomas Hardy, and Norman Birkett was too sympathetic and too widely read to settle on just one author. In the short essay, ‘The Art of Advocacy’ contained in the Six Great Advocates, he counselled that a barrister must have a ‘thorough acquaintance with the language and use of what Swift called “proper words in proper places”’. He thought literature the best preparation for a life at the Bar. One wanted that ‘storehouse’ in the mind. So, it appears my academic life researching, teaching and editing literature brings with it some legal advantage.

I made my decision, and I am mid-leap. I applied for the GDL, and I am now half-way through. The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, to my amazement, gave me a scholarship, and I have the equivalent amount to help me through Bar school. Of course, I will need to find more money, apply for larger scholarships, apply for further mini-pupillages. There is a lot to do. If I think about it all at once it can be a little overwhelming. My feet are barely off the ground and I have a full-time job. But when I am tired, I remember my first mini-pupillage and the barrister I followed. He was kind, ironic and encouraging. Amid legal conversation, he could talk knowledgeably about taxidermy, bread, cinema, azulejo and so on. He was dedicated to his work and he was curious about everything. He had read English too. I talked to him about the manuscripts I had worked on, and he introduced me to the blue pencil doctrine and how graceful written advocacy can be. He welcomed me. My world of poets and textual scholarship could be of use elsewhere.

And then I followed him into court, and in wig and gown he spoke. In those pauses between each sentence, I knew I had found where and what I wanted to be next.