Barrister’s World and The Nature of Law

The printed word has held lawyers and legal academics in its spell for too long. Mostly, when we think about "law" or "Law", we think of it as a body of clear printed texts which open themselves up to close textual analysis and which then "tell us" what to do. Yet the printed word has blinded us to the fact that much of what happens in law is not textual at all: it is to do with advocacy and persuasion. This blindness has been particularly apparent as it relates to what solicitors and barristers actually do: the research in this area is minute. If only one percent of the time spent in textual analysis had been spent on analysing law in practice, we would have a completely different view of the nature of law