Paolo Vargiu

As part of trying to make sense of the year that just happened - teaching, writing, occasionally sleeping – I am starting here with some thoughts on my Law and Religion module. It was my first time teaching it, and like most firsts, it was equal parts thrilling, awkward, enlightening, and vaguely chaotic. But something happened when things clicked, and students cared; therefore, before it all blurs into next year’s to-do list, I wanted to write a little of it down. I called the first unit “Law, Religion and the Backstory” because it sounded like something a person might actually want to read (or click, these days) on. The idea was that each unit would be “Law, Religion and…” something - “Law, Religion and Rights,” “Law, Religion and the Courts,” “Law, Religion and the Infinite Bureaucratic Machine” - but it turns out the backstory is complicated, and possibly cursed. I was trying to be clever, or at least less boring than “History of Law and Religion,” which feels like a one-way ticket...

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...

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 ar...

A note on canons, whether literary or legal. 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 about training pe...

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...

 Suffering is a deeply subjective issue that questions the structure and theoretical objectivity of the legal system. The law seeks to classify and to draw defined boundaries around concepts as intangible as suffering, and it inevitably falters. It is here that literature can enter the stage, not as an antagonist to the law but as a companion, fluent in ambiguity where law demands clarity. If one considers how the law approaches the problem of suffering in the context of assisted dying, it appears that the courts mainly question how much suffering is too much, or what threshold must be crossed before the law permits a person to seek release. Judges are obviously constrained by precedent, language, and the fear of misstep, and the tools at their disposal, such as medical reports, philosophical arguments, and the cautious wisdom of case law, are far from straightforward. Courts must seek evidence, rationality, proof, but suffering is none of these things. I...

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 enrichmen...

 It's Christmas, I have ten spare minutes per day, and I'm re-reading a few classics. John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is the one I've just finished, roughly 20 years after my first rodeo, and it has sparked some reflections on disability discrimination (I was a fully abled biped the first time I read it, and my perspective was understandably different). It's a classic, so the following synopsis is more for my own benefit should I ever actually get to write this paper than for anyone else's. The book revolves around the story of two itinerant labourers, George Milton and Lennie Small, who harbour a shared dream of attaining independence through land ownership. Lennie is a man with a cognitive disability, and he depends on George for guidance and protection. However, this relationship is rendered tragic by society's lack of understanding and accommodation for Lennie’s condition. While much has been written about Steinbeck’s commentary on marginalisation, friends...

 For fifteen years, I have resisted the siren call of the written lecture. Not out of laziness or disdain for preparation, but out of principle: from the moment I first stood in front of a classroom clutching a remote for a PowerPoint presentation, I always believed that the alchemy of a good lecture was not in the script, but in the delivery. I honed my craft during my PhD years, taking perhaps one too many public speaking workshop and eventually teaching some myself. It became clear to me that the essence of teaching was not in reading from a page, but in the living act of storytelling. Slides became my scaffolding, more detailed when the subject matter was unfamiliar, sparser and more evocative when it was well within my wheelhouse. The classroom became a sort of a stage, and at times I acted as equal parts scholar and raconteur (whether I was any good at the latter should be a question for my former students). This approach has served me well: over the years, I have relished th...

A new academic year is starting tomorrow and for some unclear reason I am feeling thrilled. Obviously, what is getting my blood pumping is not the prospect of teaching per se – that can be amazing, obviously, but after a few years it becomes too familiar a feeling to be a source of excitement – but rather the necessary structure and discipline it demands. I figured out, over the years, that summer may not be the most productive time of the year for me, writing-wise. I certainly have much more time in my hands than during teaching terms, but I also realised that open-ended mornings and afternoons make for fantastic reading slots – not so much for writing. Teaching brings with itself a schedule, non-negotiable commitments, and a sense of urgency: if I want to write until my class at 3 pm, I must get to it as soon as possible, which means that I have to deal with emails, administration and other less-than-interesting tasks quickly so that I have that coveted couple of hours to write. The ...

After a year-long hiatus, punctuated with a pleasant period of study leave and a harrowing few months on sick leave, I finally find myself, once again, in the familiar role of coaching my students for the Vis Moot. It is an endeavour that evokes ambivalence, akin to reuniting with an old friend who, while cherished, demands considerable time and energy. But let me be honest - how have I missed it! From an external perspective, the duties of a coach might seem limited to steering students through simulated legal proceedings, be it in an English courtroom or an American-style arbitration. Yet those who take part in a moot court, be they coaches or mooters, recognize its deeper essence. While the foundation undoubtedly lies in legal preparation and the students' professional growth, my emphasis - and the sentiment I strive to impart - transcends these bounds. When I speak to the new Vis Moot students, the first thing I try to stress upon is the fact that lawyers, and mooters, do not j...

As an educator, I am always pondering my teaching methods and questioning whether they are adequate for my students' growth. I have recently revisited Karl Llewellyn's " The Bramble Bush ", a book that had a profound impact on my intellectual and academic development. In the very first pages, Llewellyn demystifies the legend that the study of law is (or could be) limited to learning the rules. His words made me consider my own teaching, and how much of it is reliant on the shortcut of simply paraphrasing the rules. While teaching jurisprudence, I can easily avoid using specific provisions, except for rudimentary examples when necessary, and prioritize instead instilling the underlying principles in my students. Similarly, when it comes to teaching investment law, I have found that focusing on specific treaty rules may prove futile. Although the rules may be virtually the same across different treaties, the diversity in their interpretation by tribunals renders them un...

Having had to spend the better part of last year on bed rest, I had considerable time to devote to researching and writing about the protection of places of worship under international law. While my article, soon to be published in Ephemerides Iuris Canonici , briefly touched upon a rather thought-provoking question on whether places of worship could also be considered as religious symbols, I was unable to delve into it due to constraints of space and coherence. However, peer-reviewers, colleagues, and even myself (if I can immodestly say so) recognized it as one of the most interesting aspects of the article. After submitting the final draft, the question continued to nag at me, prompting me to embark on a new side-project. While I have only drafted an extended abstract and shared it with a few colleagues, their insightful feedback has raised numerous pertinent questions, which could potentially take a decade to fully explore. Nevertheless, I am confident that this is a worthwhile res...

This is the text of a talk delivered at "International law, conflict and disabilities: How do international conflicts affect disabled people?", webinar organized by Bringing [Dis]Ability to the Bar and Goldsmith Chambers on 29 March 2022. It briefly raises questions about how international law can protect persons with disabilities in post-conflict areas, with particular reference to Ukraine. First of all, I would like to thank Bringing my (Dis)Ability to the Bar and Goldsmith Chambers for organizing the event, and for inviting me to join the discussion. Even though Russia's invasion of Ukraine rightly monopolizes information spaces on traditional and new media, the space given to minority problems, which are exacerbated by the ongoing conflict, remains minimal, if not entirely absent, and events like this are fundamental for remembering which problems arise during a conflict, and which ones are ready to emerge as soon as the conflict ends. With my speech I intend to focu...