Paolo Vargiu

The thing about canons, whether literary or legal, is that no one agrees on them until they’re under siege. Then suddenly, they become sacred; but before that, they’re just there, obvious, assumed, like gravity or bad coffee on campus. Literature has had its canon wars: the old dead white men, the reinventions, the rediscoveries, the bitter conferences where academics bristle over whether Chaucer is still relevant when people don’t even know what a reeve is. The law is supposed to be beyond that. A serious, structured discipline where you don’t waste time debating whether a certain precedent has overstayed its welcome. And yet, the core law curriculum has its own version of this fight, perhaps less dramatic but just as ideological. There’s always been a tension between legal education as a vocational exercise - teaching students how to draft contracts, file claims, and pass the professional exams - and legal education as an intellectual discipline. The latter, the argument goes, is abo...

Is it my job to prepare students for legal practice? The question comes up often enough that I sometimes wish I had a little badge to flash when it’s asked - something modest, tasteful, nothing flashy, just a plain card reading "I am not a careers advisor". It would save time, and we would all be spared that awkward smile people give when they realize I’m not going to help their child learn how to write a 600-word brief. That's because teaching law is not about teaching the law. It’s about teaching students how to think about the law, which is like teaching someone how to play jazz by handing them sheet music for Bach. Yes, it’s incredibly hard work, but so is everything worthwhile. The trouble is that a lot of people misunderstand what education is for. They think I’m here to assemble barristers like IKEA wardrobes or to hammer out solicitors on some ancient academic forge. Sorry, but no. My job is to mess with their heads - not in the shifty-eyed, Kafkaesque sense (alth...

On Monday I'll start teaching a new module. It’s mine - conception, design, execution. A virgin territory of legal pedagogy, untouched by other hands, and, yes, I suppose I’m proud of it. It feels a little like Frankenstein must have felt, looking at his creation before it began demanding all his free time and racking up the electricity bill. There’s the rush of novelty, the thrill of steering a ship I have built myself, but also the sinking realisation that I might now have to sail it through waters I haven’t charted and might not like. Fifteen years and counting of teaching law has left me, if not jaded, then at least comfortable. Comfortably numb, one might say, but that’s a touch melodramatic. The point is, most of my lectures are as finely aged as a good Camembert. I know where the tricky bits are, where the students will glaze over, where to throw in a joke about some current event to rouse them from their torpor. Everything is prepped, polished, and on autopilot. Occasionall...