With today’s tutorial, I slam the door on the 2024–2025 academic year - a year that began, by most estimates, sometime after the Norman Conquest but before the invention of the dishwasher, and has only recently released us from its stubborn and faintly damp grasp. Term 1 stretched on like one of those Russian novels you feel virtuous owning but morally depleted trying to finish - page after page of existential trudgery. Term 2, by contrast, shot past like a shopping trolley (or my wheelchair) careening downhill: fast, erratic, and ending in a minor collision. Except for March. March, evidently, now comes in a new 14-week format, an extended director’s cut of confusion and deadlines.
Since the memories are still vaguely warm, like the sad slice of toast forgotten under the tea towel, I am scribbling down some notes before the rot sets in, just enough to remind myself in October, when I’m muttering “how the hell did we get here again?” into my second coffee, that I have been through this before and, somehow, survived.
International Commercial Arbitration turned ten this year. Not quite old enough to vote, but certainly too old for TikTok. The module has settled into that comfortable middle age where one no longer tries to be popular and just hopes to be understood. Student numbers have stabilised at “selective,” which is our genteel euphemism for “underpopulated but spared the axe"; it remains resolutely niche, and I say that with pride. There is something quietly heroic about students who voluntarily wade into arbitration (a topic that to most has all the narrative sex appeal of a stationary cupboard) and yet, here they are, usually having at least skimmed the Wikipedia page on arbitration and arrived curious rather than terrified. Masood and I continue to co-pilot the thing, exchanging glances across the semester like two men stuck in the same escape room. There are still the inevitable dead zones - emergency arbitration, for instance, must be taught even though it's about as compelling as a printer manual in translation - but overall it buzzes along better than it ought to. This year’s marks were reassuringly high, and not because we were tossing out gold stars like confetti but because they actually got it. Might be time to sharpen the essay questions, though. Less warm-up, more meat, give them something chewy enough to dislocate a jaw.
Jurisprudence, on the other hand, began as a controlled explosion. Ten lectures. First six: me, hacking away at the overgrowth of law, language, literature, and meaning, while a roomful of students stared back with the glassy-eyed detachment of cattle at a passing train. I assumed they were lost, or possibly concussed. I soldiered on. Later on, like a switch had been thrown, enter the Big Four: Rawls, Hayek, Berlin, Cohen. Suddenly I got eye contact, questions, notes being taken, people thinking. Turns out the issue wasn’t them: it was me. They didn’t want the interpretive warm-up, the philosophical stretching exercises: they came for the brawlers, the ones with theories that bite. Lesson learned: next year, less preamble, more firepower. Out with the gentle epistemological noodling, in with the heavyweights: Kelsen and Raz, Mill with his perennial angst, and maybe even a dash of Dworkin, pilfered from my more generous colleagues. Let’s not pretend: I love a good academic heist.
Law and Religion nearly killed me. New module. No inheritance. No archive of dusty PowerPoints. No trail of breadcrumbs left by previous tutors. Just me, a blinking cursor, and the haunting suspicion that none of it would land. My entire prep strategy resembled early Renaissance exploration: brave, underfunded, and slightly doomed. But the students—my God, the students: smart, inquisitive, patient with my errant metaphors and failed slide transitions. They showed up, they thought, and they cared. I clearly butchered a key point somewhere early on - the formative assessment exposed the wound - but they bore it with more grace than I deserved. If anything, it made the module more real. Less perfection, more process. The real thrill was seeing those flickers - the sharp minds, the thoughtful questions, the arguments I did not see coming, the sort of students one quietly hopes will wander back in doctoral form someday, though of course one says absolutely nothing. It’s bad form to tell them: they have to realise it for themselves. If they do stay in touch, I’ll count myself lucky. The best ones always make you raise your game, even when they don’t mean to.
So here we are. The season is over. I have made it to the end with only minor burns and one twitching eyelid. There are still essays to mark, some departmental ritual sacrifices to attend, and the summer reading list to pretend I’ll read, but the heavy lifting is done, for now.