As an academic lawyer, keeping up can sometimes feel impossible. Legal developments churn out at a pace that rivals London’s rush hour, and alongside them is the relentless stream of academic discourse online and in person. Papers, panels, journal articles, social media posts, webinars - every bit of it carrying an air of urgency, as if missing out might spell professional doom.
At some point this past term I’ve started to wonder how much of it really matters.
It’s not that I don’t care about the law or my work - quite the opposite: I define myself as an academic, to the point that losing use of 75% of my body wasn’t as much a trauma as it usually is for other winners of the spinal cord injury lottery, because I could keep doing what I love without too many adjustments.1 But trying to stay ahead of every new decision, every article that might be tangentially related to my niche, and every panel discussion hosted in some far-flung time zone often feels less like intellectual enrichment and more like a treadmill I never asked to be on.
The law, for all its importance, moves at a pace best described as leisurely. Cases that matter don’t disappear in a flash, and the ideas that stick around have a way of cropping up again - in a footnote, an offhand remark, or maybe when I’m skimming something only loosely related. And if they don’t? Well, maybe they weren’t all that important to begin with. There’s a culture in academia that thrives on visibility. We’re encouraged, more or less explicitly, to write, publish, and speak, and then to keep tabs on others doing the same. Who’s presenting at which conference? Who’s guest-editing the latest issue of a niche journal? What was that provocative tweet about Article 267 TFEU? It’s exhausting.
It’s also, dare I say, a bit pointless.
For every new piece of analysis I skim on Westlaw, there’s another I miss entirely. For every conference talk I attend, I wonder about the dozen I didn’t. Here’s the thing, though: does the law require us to be omniscient? The world of ideas doesn’t demand perfect attendance. What matters is depth, not breadth, as my supervisor used to point out.2 Thoughtful engagement with the material I do encounter will always matter more than some imaginary, encyclopaedic knowledge of everything happening everywhere. Once, I might have been afraid to admit this. There’s a kind of professional FOMO - fear of missing out, for those of you unfamiliar with Maneskin’s bassist - that feels baked into academia. FOMO tells us we must have read that new paper, have an opinion on that recent judgment, be at the forefront of every conversation, or risk irrelevance.
I’ve decided to break up with that mindset. Instead, I trust the process.3 Ideas and knowledge have a way of circulating. The good ones will find me, even if I wasn’t in the room where they were first discussed. I’ve stumbled across key cases years after their judgment, and I’ve come across brilliant papers in journals I didn’t even know existed until someone brought them to my attention. So, I’ve stopped worrying about what I’m missing. If something’s meant to matter to my work, it’ll show up eventually. And if it doesn’t? I guess I’ll live – I’ve survived two tumours, I’ll survive not reading an article.
This isn’t an excuse for laziness: it’s permission to focus. To write with care, to read with intention, and to contribute to legal conversations without being consumed by them. If anything, stepping back has allowed for more clarity and more time for the ideas that truly resonate.
So, here’s my advice, not that you asked for it:4 let some of it go. You’ll never read it all, or hear it all, or know it all. And you don’t need to. The law, like the tide, keeps coming back.
1 Oh, crip time is an absolute juggernaut of inconvenience, make no mistake. It marches through my life with all the subtlety of a brass band in a library. But as for my identity? Sorry to disappoint - it remains delightfully unaffected.
2 Twice a week on average, as I’ve never been the greatest at listening.
3 My process, not Joel Embiid. I’ve lost faith in him since he’s pretty much admitted he won’t bother with the regular season anymore.
4 Indeed, it’s mainly advice to myself.