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 (although, some days…), but in the sense of handing them a toolkit to dismantle and rebuild the law, one maddening paradox at a time. You don’t prepare someone for legal practice: you throw them into the jungle of jurisprudence and hope they come out the other side, slightly bruised but armed with the kind of reasoning that might save their skins when the lions of practice start circling. They’ll learn the job later, anyway, when it matters. There’s a whole conveyor belt waiting for them after graduation - the Legal Practice Course, pupillage, and that curious alchemy of networking, ambition, and caffeine addiction. That’s their business, not mine. Mine is to make them see that the law is an endless maze of language and logic, a game of chess played with half the rules missing and no guarantee anyone will remember to say “checkmate.” If that doesn’t prepare them for life, well, nothing will. So, no. I don’t teach them how to be lawyers. I teach them how to think like one, which is far more dangerous. What they do with that is up to them.