[trade] what surprises me most studying law
It's been a while, but I finally have a blog title trade again! James gave me the blog title "What surprises me most studying law". You can read what title I gave him here.
Starting off with some small surprises: Looking back on the attitude I had before I started studying law, I thought it would be a lot harder. Or rather, difficult in a different way than it actually ended up being so far.
This is explicitly not meant as a humble brag of "Look how good I am at this, so easy!", it's just that I didn't know just how much is explicitly mentioned in the law (because I did not care about reading it much before), and that you are allowed to take it with you into the exams to look stuff up in. I was surprised that law is not actually about knowing all of these by heart (almost none of that is needed), but that you just need to know where the information is and that it exists.
This works in my favor. I can be forgetful about details, but I still know where exactly I found some piece of information. I think if more people knew about this aspect of studying law, maybe more people would consider it and not shy away from it!
What also surprised me was the intense focus on practice cases (at least here, In Germany). This is heavily criticized and I also have my gripes with it, but it also means that in the exams, you are writing a report judging a given case based on a specific rigid structure. The cases usually belong to previously defined and covered case groups. It's likely you have already solved practice cases with that exact problem or heard about it in the news or existing case law, so you know what kind of laws you need to apply, and you also don't need to worry about how to structure the report as you need to follow a specific format. At least at my university, you do not actually end up writing a sort of free-form essay until the Bachelor thesis.
As long as you follow the formalities, know some case law that was covered in the materials, solve some practice cases and can detect hints in the text about what the problem in the case is, you have a good chance of passing. All you have to do is follow the structure that's the same for all exams, open the book to the specific paragraphs you need, and read what's in it. You still need to know the numbers yourself and when each is applied, and some definitions of terms and different interpretations; but that is far less than other degrees have to learn by heart.
But what surprised me most is that there is not "the one correct interpretation" of almost anything!
There are controversies about most things in German law, with at least 2-5 different interpretations and views on how a specific paragraph is applied or worded. Laypeople often feel confident to just quote any paragraph at others and insist that it means xyz, but not even the experts and professionals are agreeing on it. The world of law may look black and white from the outside, but there's a good reason why most people you meet in law will answer anything with "It depends...".
On one hand: Yes, parts of law are written in a way that it is supposed to cover a lot of different cases under one umbrella; but on the other hand, law also needs to allow for some flexibility for outliers and new developments. That means it's usually not as clear-cut as it seems from the outside.
That's also why we have courts - they continue to develop case law that adds to the interpretation of paragraphs and articles, and they stick to one interpretation or develop a new one, while making a decision in the discretion the law gives them. If law was actually such a straightforward thing that perfectly and clearly covers every situation, we wouldn't need courts deciding (aside from the right of parties to defend themselves, of course). That also means that two people that did the exact same thing could walk out of court with different results. That may feel unjust, but so is life.
I can see this directly in action in the data protection law space: Law groups focused on digital rights and informational self-determination of users argue for different interpretations of GDPR articles than lawyers employed by large social media companies.
Law is further developed and changing every day, and an on-going conversation between many different parties and circumstances; totally different from the rigid set of rules I expected. :)
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