An often forgotten thing about law is that it’s all words. Words in statutes, words in contracts, words in judgments, words in emails that make you wonder if some people have evolved beyond the need for punctuation. And yet, despite this, too many a law student (and, let’s be honest, quite a few lawyers) seem to believe they can master the trade without ever thinking too hard about language itself. They pore over legislation, memorise cases, and produce essays so structurally sound they could double as Brutalist architecture, but ask them to read a novel and they look at you like you’ve suggested taking up juggling as a form of professional development. Which is a shame, because literature teaches what no statute book ever will: how words work. It teaches rhythm, persuasion, subtext. It shows how meaning shifts depending on context, how ambiguity isn’t always a flaw but sometimes the very point. One can learn the law by reading legal texts, but no one can learn how to argue - really argue - without reading people who knew how to manipulate language long before the first courtroom ever convened. Because, at the end of the day, legal arguments are stories. Some are tragedies, some are farces, most are somewhere in between. Advocacy isn’t about mechanically applying precedent: it’s about constructing a version of events so compelling, so inevitable, that the other side’s argument starts to seem like an unfortunate misunderstanding rather than an actual counterpoint. A good lawyer knows the law, but a great one knows how to make it feel right. This is why I try (though probably not enough) to push my students towards literature. Some listen, and it's evident: their writing has movement, their arguments don’t feel like they’ve been assembled from a checklist, and they understand that persuasion is as much about what one doesn't say as what one does. Others resist, convinced that reading anything without footnotes is a betrayal of their legal training. They might go on to have perfectly respectable careers, drafting impenetrable contracts and producing bulletproof but deeply uninspiring submissions. They might do fine. The ones who read, however, those who take language seriously, who understand that law is an art as much as it is a science, they'll be spectacular.