The practice and the study of law is indeed interesting. As a student of law being susceptible to the perception that my colleagues and fellow classmates share of the relation between the practice and the study of law, I perhaps can say of it, what Salarino says of Shylock and Jessica.
Surely the history of facts and fables is witness to the great duels of David and Goliath, of Alexander and Porus, of Zeus and Cronus and the like. And I am urged to add to that epic list, the warring understanding that the study and the practice of law is colloquially said to produce amongst us students.
The understanding that most of my colleagues seem to have of these aspects of the law, according to whom these aren’t ‘aspects’ but rather ‘distinct choices’ that every student in the law possesses the liberty of making, is that ‘the waters of the Ganges of legal practice wash away, with ablutions, the sins and ills that the academic study of law casts on the moral legal soul’.
This is what legal practice is to them –the Ganges, the Thames; and the academics, the worldly sphere that arrows mortal sins of illusion, unreality, unpreparedness and the veniality of irrelevance in an actual world.
They are a hundred Salarinos who proclaim, that the unhappy, villainous Shylock of academics is as distinct from the lovely Jessica of legal practice, as jet is from ivory. As distant and unrelated as the heavens are to the earth. To them these aren’t two sides of the same coin, but two different, untranslatable denominations of two different currencies of nations at the farthest corners of the world!
Whatever the richness of experience of the various factors that impel such an understanding, or its poverty be, the sound understanding is (and I run the hazard of sounding perhaps a little too naive or ‘uniformed of realities’) that the import of law’s academic study cannot be so drastically dissimilar as to practically controvert it. After all ‘legal practice’ is the practice ‘of’ the law and not ‘against’ it. Nothing then can justify a dismissive approach, a brazen neglect of the books.
Of course there is bound to be an unmistakable and a necessary difference between the opacity and purity of the glacier and the transparency and contents of the river emergent. But it is a grave folly to think that the practice is a part of its own, sterilisingly distinct and overriding the study of law. Such is then akin to fantasize suicide of law. An arm that strangles its own throat.
Perhaps it is apt to imbibe what Shakespeare speaks of in his Sonnet VIII when he corrects us with, “… If the true concord of well-tuned sounds, by unions married, do offend thine ear. They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds in singleness the parts that thou shouldn’t bear. Mark how one string, sweet husband to another, strikes each in each by mutual ordering.”
