Whoever said the bench was not for timorous souls must have either forgotten or skipped law school entirely. Like perhaps many before me, the romanticism with which I viewed the legal profession before entering the law faculty has hardly survived the rigour of the first few weeks.
To compound my woes, we are being constantly reminded at lectures that “we have not yet started”. Not yet started? Really? Somehow my colleagues and I interrogated these assertions, disbelieving perhaps that it could get any worse than it already was. Like probably many before us, we were wrong. Life’s problems do indeed come in ten-fold.
To be fair, I cannot deny having being forewarned by friends, who as it is said, “have gone through the system” as to how demanding the faculty can be. Trust me when I say, not for once did I dismiss it all as showboating. The truth is, nothing quite prepares you for the experience the law faculty submerges you in. It is thus not surprising, that barely a semester through the program, I am already convinced that law might just be the only discipline where “a word to the wise is surely not in the north” but most likely in the plethora of cases to be read and briefed. Plus, I have been to the north and I am quite convinced, who ever said that was not referring to the tasty guinea fowls and pito available on demand.
The question remains though, what has been my biggest challenge at the law faculty? Is there anything worth writing home about? Is there an experience worth sharing? What is my reaction to these experiences, if any? Admittedly, it certainly may seem premature to suggest definite answers to questions which are equally complex and sensitive, and which are open to further scrutiny as the months pile on. However, this is too tempting a call to shy away from.
Very often in society, we all have different conceptions of what is right and what is wrong, we all ‘know’ the extent of our rights and never the limits, of course we all know that the corrupt ones in society are the ministers in the previous government, and in our extensive “knowledge” acquired mostly through the talkshows on Obonu fm, we all know that, what the law is, is only a synonym of what it ought to be.
It is this our ‘acquired extensive knowledge’ that the law lecturers have singled out for condemnation, hitting hard at it as the blacksmith does to hot rods on his anvil. We have been urged to “rasa the tabula” and this, it seems would be my biggest challenge in the law faculty.
How I go from ‘the all knowing village kingkong’ to a greenhorn, would no doubt be the scale on which my strides in law would be gauged.
You would be wrong to labour under the misguided apprehension that I may be one stubborn individual. Au contraire! I have often embraced life’s challenges with open arms and tolerance.
However, when the foundation on which one’s moral being is built is questioned and brought into disrepute, even the strongest souls are tempted to ask “Eloi eloi lama sabachthani”
Few people are unfamiliar with the phrase “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers” .
(Not This way)
This Way
This is overdoing it. Aaaahba why?
Rueful and mocking, it often expresses the ordinary person's frustration with the arcana and complexity of law. To many in society, lawyers who are now clothed as greedy politicians have held the law hostage, employing it from time to time as a cudgel with which they bludgeon the weak and the downtrodden masses. In the process, they have erected a system where the fabric of governance remains devoid of political morality, where the law has lost its ability to provide an equal terrain for the pursuit of happiness. They have created a society of class, a society where cut-throat is good and the fit only survive at the expense of the weak.
To many, lawyers do not even deserve to be buried the conventional way, their face must ‘face down’.
Mea culpa! Maybe on some level, I also came to the law faculty believing it to be only way I could right society’s wrongs, believing that if the gangrene is to be healed, it must surely come from within rather than from without the legal profession.
Today, as I sit in a law library submerged in the beauty and brilliance of some judgement delivered by some dead and gone judge in the 18th century, it all suddenly hits me. I may have chosen the wrong enemy after all. For what would society be, if amidst the clash of arms the law should fall silent ?
What would become of the ‘downtrodden’ if judges were to selectively abdicate their judicial functions and repudiate their oaths ? What would become of our society if citizens were denied the right to counsel?
We know that everyone hates lawyers until they need one. And it is for those occasions when we may indeed need a lawyer, that we should be suspect of anyone who seeks to eliminate them. Indeed, many are the times when we heard the rallying cry quoting from Shakespeare’s Henry VI : “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” But those who use this phrase against lawyers are as miserably misguided about their Shakespeare as they are about the judicial system which they disdain so freely.
Contrary to popular belief, the proposal was not designed to restore sanity to communal life. Rather, it was intended to eliminate those who might stand in the way of a contemplated revolution thus underscoring the important role that lawyers can play in society. Even the plotter of treachery in Shakespeare's King Henry VI was convinced the surest way to chaos and tyranny was to remove the guardians of independent thinking.
Let us not get ahead of ourselves though for I am only halfway through even the first semester.
However I take consolation from a quote often attributed to Socrates, “by all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.”
Whether I get to sip wine with the Chief Justice some day
or end up philosophizing, only time will tell.
As always, your comments are welcome and would be gravely appreciated. Dont to sign your name!!
