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I taught my last class of Jurisprudence and Legal Theory today and with it, pulled the curtains on a 15 year stint of teaching the subject. I hope you will indulge me in this thread, which is making me quite nostalgic as I type it up.
I started teaching the External Program straight after completing my Bar in 2004. The motivation to teach was to mainly support the dogshit salary that trainee lawyers like myself earned in 2004 as well as testing the theory that teaching something makes you more well rounded.
After falling in a couple of subjects, I settled on Jurisprudence, which is essentially, Legal Philosophy 101. For an ordinary law student, the subject seemed equally pointless and terrifying.
My earlier teaching style was a rather tortured version of the Socratic Method; I’d continuously push kids to answer questions when they wanted to be left the fuck alone and simply take notes.
Socrates was called an gadfly, an irritating instect who drove people to despair by questioning their views; I followed the same course. I didn’t help myself by being rather belligerent in my early years of teaching, applying sarcasm and dark humour liberally.
All of that stemmed from an inherent fear of losing control of the class, something every teacher is incredibly wary of, but I probably went too much the other way and gained a reputation of a grumpy old sod.
Here’s the thing with External Program students; Majority of them realise that they can get a half decent grade by studying for a couple of months in a degree where’s there no coursework. They thus conveniently bunk classes and rely on the largesse of of other students’ notes
But there’s always a core group that attend most classes because they want to learn something, are intellectually curious and will stretch every mental sinew to debate an idea.
This core always came through in the final 3-4 months of the subject; they made you think, they debated vigorously and they disagreed with each other. In short it felt like a proper classroom.
It’s this core that made me come back to teaching the subject year after year. Here’s the amazing thing about teaching; you can see a good student evolve before your very eyes, it’s like a proper metamorphosis.
For the larger part teaching was a very real distraction from the slippery slope of law practice, classes had to be rescheduled for a court hearing, client meetings or when you were just too damn tired from work. In many ways it suffered.
Yet, it was welcome when it offered relief from the drudgery reviewing 300 page Contracts, drafting voluminous Petitions and having clients barking at you for drafts which were time sensitive.
For the most part, Jurispduence was shockingly relevant to law practice; I’d liberally use real examples from my practice to my students to discuss some arcane points e.g how would a natural lawyer view the retrospective nature of a tax statute/notification by the FBR?
Was Musharraf’s 2007 Second Martial Law be valid according to Positivists because a new Supreme Court took Oath under it? Would Marx treat Contract Law as a tool of the bourgeois in validating manifestly unequal bargaining positions? So many questions that arose almost everyday
Significantly though, teaching was a lifeline for me when my Father unexpectedly passed way on May 20, 2016. I threw myself in my work to anaesthetise the pain and teaching offered respite and an escape.
I have no professional advice to offer to my graduating students. You are entering a profession that is at times, deeply rigged in favour of those who have contacts, can be egoistic and misogynistic as well as slow in rewarding merit.
However, it can be equally satisfying when it comes together and slogging away at it can make you a decent living and contacts. It’s why they call it law practice, because it incessantly requires you to practice your trade, day in and day out.
So keep at it, long enough and you’ll definitely get somewhere. Be wary of senior lawyers offering you quick solutions into success in the practice, because that usually smuggles in their own subjective perspective and doesn’t mention their own privilege.
If I were to offer a single piece of advice it would be to never lose sight of other experiences, especially in the early part of your career. Our educational system denigrates critical thinking, but equally our entire system rebels against pursuing disciplines that seem wasteful
Too many students go through their entire life without experiencing other disciplines; philosophy, history, science, exploring altered states of consciousness (with our without external help). They toe the line of conformity, because our set up feeds into it and encourages it.
This is why I violently oppose going for a Postgrad if you’re practicing law in Pakistan, if you’re privileged enough to do so. Take that money, use it to travel or fuel other interests whilst you practice on the slippery slope of the law.
I’ve had some amazing students who are currently outstanding in their fields. Some of them are on Twitter @wordoflaw @noorejazch , @saratamman . Follow them if you aren’t doing it already. I learn something from them everyday.
Finally, I owe a debt to @laalshah sb, the OG of Jurisprudence , who inadvertently infused a love of teaching the subject in me, through deconstructing my own tenuously held views.
