Last month I began a pupillage at Field Court Chambers. It is a civil set with a strong Public Law team, and I am enjoying spending time in the Court of Protection and the Administrative Court. The power of the state over the individual, and the rights that the individual might have against the exercise of state power, was a theme of my undergraduate studies and my career since (at least) 2007.
So I find myself in a state of eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία), the good spirit of feeling I am doing exactly what I should doing. I cannot wait to begin taking instructions and building a practice.
My new job has got me thinking about this old blog. My conversion to the law and subsequent legal work in the County Courts and for the Royal Borough of Greenwich has kept me away.
The activism of writing was entirely in keeping with my work at English PEN. But in recent years, I felt I had to refrain. There were many reasons for this.
The first was because, know thyself, this kind of writing can be a time sink. My studies, my work and the hideous process of securing pupillage meant I did not have the time to spare.
Second, litigation also requires argumentative writing, which is fun. I found it fulfilling to put my creative energies into my work.
I have also come to realise that political blogging, as a form of political participation, requires a certain momentum. In the early days of blogging I felt that my writing had the genuine potential to persuade, and that my reading had the genuine potential to persuade me. This was because it was a dialogue. I never blogged purely for the sake of it, and never followed the most obvious rule for building an online audience, that of posting on a regular schedule. But there was enough going on in the country, and enough shoddy thinking in public life, that there was always another thing to say.
Since leaving English PEN I lost that momentum.
Twitter also eroded much of the impetus to write long form. Some of the blogs on here were republished ‘tweet threads’. This kind of writing is not necessarily a bad thing: some writers I admire, like David Allen Green and Cory Doctorow, have perfected the art of the one sentence paragraph — I am sure this is because their rise to prominence was driven by social media.
Short, punchy paragraphs are also the base-element of the ‘skeleton arguments’ that the civil courts require for hearings and trials, so there is a practical use for bite-sized thinking and writing.
Overall, however, I’d say that Twitter pulled both my attention and the audience for my thoughts into its maw. I cannot see how securing a few followers facilitated my further intellectual development, when it came at the expense of long-form reading and writing.
Barristers occupy a privileged place in public life. As ‘counsel’ we trade on narrow expertise and we are granted an authority that is denied to others. This suits my character far more than the alternative way for mid-career, middle-aged people to accrue status, which is to manage teams or organisations. I don’t think I’m very good at that.
Happily, the professional requirement to develop expertise sits very well with having my own space to develop my thoughts and understanding.
All of this is a very long-winded way of saying that I hope I will be making better use of this online space, still free of external moderation. It is clear that the focus will be more legalistic than in previous periods (indeed, my last two posts have been about legal rules in Family Law). But I will continue to have one eye on the political threats to our human rights framework, and how they can be resisted.