There has long been nothing that can stop legal professionals
Law is an ancient discipline. When the University of Bologna was founded, the law school, alongside the divinity school and the medical school, became one of its oldest faculties. The law schools have produced legal professionals in overwhelming numbers—so many that in the United States, a country notoriously oversupplied with lawyers, people would almost wish for a world without them. Of course, we on this side still fall somewhat short of the 300,000 lawyers envisioned by Deng Xiaoping. (Editor’s note: When meeting with the Prime Minister of Singapore in the 1980s, Comrade Deng Xiaoping remarked that China’s future modernization drive would require at least 300,000 lawyers.) But that is hardly the point. After all, nothing can stop legal professionals anymore.
[3] It is only natural for legal professionals to achieve success in the field of law, but they are clearly not content to stay within their own domain, extending their reach in all directions. There are countless politicians who have attended law school. Not to mention how many lawyers were involved in the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, nor how many world leaders have studied law. Even the fifth generation of our country's leadership holds law degrees.
Let us first talk about those who can truly be called saints: Mandela and Gandhi. Mandela first obtained a correspondence law degree from the University of London while in prison, and after his release, he went on to study law at the University of Witwatersrand, and then co-founded a law firm with others, providing free or low-cost legal consultation services to Black people who could not afford defense lawyers. Gandhi, on the other hand, studied law at University College London, obtained the qualification of a barrister in the British Empire, and practiced in Bombay. Of course, these two were also political figures, and politics will not be discussed below.
[5] The German jurist Gustav Radbruch once said: Many poets are students who escaped from law school. Hai Zi, from Peking University's law school, once taught at China University of Political Science and Law, and I have heard anecdotes about him from a teacher there. Before going abroad, Xu Zhimo studied in the preparatory law program at Tianjin University's Peiyang campus, which later led to his time at Cambridge.
There were even more "deserters" who abandoned law for literature. Teacher He Fan (affectionately known as "Boxed Lunch") summarized this in his translator's afterword to Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian:
Balzac graduated from the Paris Law School; Heine held a doctorate in law from the University of Göttingen in Germany; Stendhal was born into a legal family, his father being a lawyer at the French Supreme Court; Schiller studied law for two years at the Karlsschule before abandoning it for medicine; Tagore also studied law before pursuing English literature at the University of London. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther was based on his melancholy experiences as an intern at the High Court. He also practiced law for four years, and although most of his cases came through his uncle, who had become a judge, he gained fame for his magnificent and rhetorically ornate civil pleadings, demonstrating a remarkable fusion of legal and linguistic talent.
The Brothers Grimm were also jurists, especially Jacob Grimm, who authored On the Poetry of Law (1816), German Legal Antiquities (1828), Decisions of the Courts (4 volumes, 1840-1863), and Lectures on German Legal Antiquities, exerting significant influence in that era.
Among literary figures, Kafka, who held a doctorate in law, is a must-mention; his *The Trial* remains required reading for law students, with *Before the Law* opening with a passage from it. Regrettably, I have not yet read it—I must find a copy.
If you find literature not profound enough, the realm of thinkers is also dominated by a large number of legal professionals. Max Weber studied in the law department at the University of Göttingen, later served as a trainee lawyer, also worked as a judge, and even earned a doctorate in law. Marx studied law in Berlin before embarking on the “point of no return” as a world citizen.
If you feel that thinkers are still not close enough to the essence of the world, then become a mathematician. The Frenchman Fermat studied law at the University of Orléans and the University of Toulouse, and later became a lawyer—by the way, it is said that his legal qualification was purchased. As an amateur in mathematics, Fermat independently discovered the fundamental principles of analytic geometry, established methods for finding tangents, maxima and minima, and definite integrals in calculus, making significant contributions to the field. He also introduced random variables and mathematical expectation into probability theory, and proposed the principle of least action in optics. What is more, he left behind “Fermat’s Last Theorem”: it is impossible to split a cube into the sum of two cubes, or a fourth power into the sum of two fourth powers, or, in general, any power higher than the second into the sum of two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
It was this very "no room to write it down" that left professional mathematicians unable to prove the theorem until 1995, a span of 358 years.
If none of these appeal to you, well then, let’s go into art. Tchaikovsky also studied at law school and even worked at a court, which he thoroughly disliked. He later resigned to study music, and only then did he leave us masterpieces like Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. Schumann was also made by his mother to study law in Leipzig and Heidelberg, until a concert at age 20 inspired him to switch to studying piano. Of course, people seem more interested in his love story.
If you come from a law school background but dislike law, then consider: do you want to become a saint, poet, writer, thinker, mathematician, or musical theater artist? You have to pick one. (Author: Shiyu, Source: Douban)
