I have studied Law for 4 years now. I have learnt theoretical concepts of constitution and constitutionalism, contracts, legal systems, social foundations of law, jurisprudence, criminal procedure, civil procedure, family law, labour law, company law. I have had the privilege of studying diplomatic and consular law, international human rights and humanitarian law, succession law, conflict of laws et al.
I have spent many hours poring through Kenya Law Reports and All England Law Reports and an assortment of other Law Reports. I have read legal texts to understand fine principles of law and to seek deeper understanding of the legal realm. I have interacted with one of the finest legal minds in my lecture halls and listened to their arguments. I have involved myself in those legal discourses. I have gone to the courts to understand how the courts work and have been to the law firms to seek understanding.
With such a background, one may ask: Now, Lorot Son of the Hills, what didn’t they teach you in Law School?
There are so many things they did not teach me. And I don’t fault my lecturers nor our educational system. But these are hard facts.
You graduate with a Second Class Upper Division or a Lower Division. Friends, relatives, acquaintances are so happy for your feat, your mettle. You are a wakili. After the celebrations, when the dust has finally settled, you walk into the future with spring in your feet. You are armed with your degree and legal theories from J.J. Rousseau and John Locke. You have your hopes high, after all you are a legal gem, a wit that the legal profession badly needs. In all your classes you could always wonder what this animal called joblessness is all about. Is it a furred animal? Two-legged? Four-legged? And what is this thing about Jobless Corner at Hilton? Fact or fiction?
Then you are hauled into the biting reality. No parents chipping in with fare or this money or that for an ‘educational trip’ to Mombasa. No more privilege of sending a ‘please call me’ only to be sent more airtime. No more sympathy for a ‘student’. ( My friend Tiyan once said that his lecturer remembered how good it was to be a student because any other person who heard that one was a student was struck with ‘instant sympathy’ and gave out some money). You are now a man, a woman. You gotta fight, nucca, you gotta fight as your own.
You realize that your life is no longer a theory. You surmise that your daily life is more than legal suppositions and propositions. You absorb the truth that the daily life is not the safe confine of a lecture hall or the campus corridors. It is never structured, it is not predictable, It is not rosy, It is thorned, bristly, a nettle.
In Law School I was taught to have good grades and to do my bit but outside here it is more about being versatile, to have your networks and being in the right places at the right time. It is more than having good credentials. It is about being practical, not theoretical.
In Law School everything happens like a clockwork. Set times for lectures, scheduled exams, scheduled semester programmes and activities. In the rough and tumble of life, boy, you are thrust into uncertainties. To stay afloat, you learn to draw your goals and plan of action. You are the one in control.
In Law School I was not taught about the nuts and bolts of the legal profession, for instance you will start small and after several years could you think of becoming a big-shot lawyer. I always thought dressing sharply in a suit and carrying a well-loaded satchel or a suitcase and going to court was more like everything that will run like clockwork. But now, I realize it is something more than saying ‘If it pleases the court’, ‘Yes, My Lord’, ‘Most obliged, my Lord’. It is about knowing the street code, the life’s semantics, its lies and facades, its rules and inhibitions. It is about the ability of feeling the pulse, the throb of law outside classroom.
The legal profession, in the final analysis, is a seedling. It takes time to water it to a tree. After constant reading of legal texts, research, delving into the silent world of academia and into the courtrooms, this tree will mature into the tallest, wide-girthed tree. At the end of it all, it only rewards those who are passionate and true to it. In the same profession, there are those who perpetually lurking in the shadows of half-starvation, half-sustenance. But there is also another category of those living off the gains, savoring every bit of its reward. Oh! The ironies of law!
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