There has long been nothing that can stop legal professionals
[2] Jurisprudence is an ancient field of study. When the University of Bologna was established, the faculties of law, theology, and medicine were the oldest disciplines. Law schools have produced countless legal professionals, especially in the United States, where there is an oversupply of lawyers, to the point that some wish for a world without lawyers. Of course, in our country, we are still some distance from the 300,000 lawyers set by Comrade Deng Xiaoping (Editor's note: During a meeting with the Prime Minister of Singapore in the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping stated that China's modernization would require at least 300,000 lawyers). But this is not the key point, as 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.
[4] Let us first mention those who can be called saints: Mandela and Gandhi. Mandela first earned a law degree through correspondence from the University of London while in prison, then studied law at the University of the Witwatersrand after his release, and later co-founded a law firm that provided free or low-cost legal services to Black people who could not afford defense lawyers. Gandhi studied law at University College London, qualified as a barrister in the British Empire, and practiced in Mumbai. Of course, these two were also political figures, but we will set politics aside for now.
[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.
[6] There are even more "deserters" who abandoned law for literature. In his postscript to the translation of "Dickens as a Legal Historian," He Fan (He Fan) summarized:
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 University College London. Goethe's *The Sorrows of Young Werther* was based on his melancholic experiences as an intern at the High Court, and he later practiced as a lawyer for four years, gaining fame for his grand and rhetorically ornate civil pleadings—though many of his cases came from his uncle, a judge—thus skillfully blending his talents in law and language.
The Brothers Grimm were also jurists, particularly Jacob Grimm, who authored *On the Poetry in Law* (1816), *German Legal Antiquities* (1828), *Collections of Legal Cases* (4 volumes, 1840–1863), and *Lectures on German Legal Antiquities*, exerting significant influence in their 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 literature seems insufficiently profound, the realm of thinkers is also dominated by legal minds. Max Weber studied law at the University of Göttingen, later worked as a trainee lawyer, served as a judge, and earned a doctorate in law. Marx studied law in Berlin before embarking on his "irreversible path" as a citizen of the world.
If thinkers still seem too distant from the essence of the world, then become a mathematician. The Frenchman Fermat studied law at the University of Orléans and the University of Toulouse, later working as a lawyer—though it is said he purchased his legal qualification. Fermat pursued mathematics as a hobby, independently discovering the basic principles of analytic geometry, developing methods for finding tangents, maxima, minima, and definite integrals in calculus—making major contributions to the field—and introducing random variables and mathematical expectation into probability theory, as well as proposing the principle of least action in optics. More audaciously, he left behind "Fermat's Last Theorem": it is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or generally any power higher than the second into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
This very "too narrow to contain" kept professional mathematicians from proving the theorem until 1995, spanning 358 years.
If none of these appeal to you, well, let's go into art. Tchaikovsky also studied at law school and worked in a court, though he was quite unhappy, and later resigned to study music, leaving us masterpieces like *Swan Lake* and *The Nutcracker*. Schumann, at his mother's request, studied law in Leipzig and Heidelberg, and only at age 20, after a concert, did he resolve to switch to studying piano—though it seems people are 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)
