Why law, you say

Left-side: Palais de Justice, taken in 2017, myself a lawyer; Right-side: screening room in UGC Ciné Cité Les Halles, taken in 2007, myself a film buff; Both pictures shot on 35mm film

There is one trait that has stuck with me throughout the years and that sometimes creeps out in some of the conversations I have. I’m talking about my worship of curiosity, making it the master of my life. It is not lets-break-down-this-thing-and-put-it-together-kind of curiosity, but the one that questions fundamental motives behind events and actions. While it sounds like every other ordinary curiosity on paper, it has shaped and guided my life. Sometimes shamefully, I would admit how it dominates and takes over most of my adult responsibilities and for that I owe an explanation, but whatever pitfalls come from it, that wiring has never changed in me.

In my early years, I studied film because, besides being interested in it to say the least, it was the best canvas, a field-work to study and to cater to that raw curiosity. By consuming at times five films a day or spending ten hours in screening rooms, I had the most diverse canvas, full of events and stories (fiction or not) to explore. I learned to feel for the stories and enjoyed them but most importantly I learned to listen and hear them out. And it’s simple you’re in one-way communication. Up until this day, I’m the most naive film viewer, I can never anticipate the ending, what’s the point? Why I didn’t stick around film might be a different story itself but the fact is that even though film is my soft spot and go-within tool, I am distanced from it. I ascribe it to curiosity unsettled. When you listen and hear stories, you either become captive to their fiction, their beauty, to the medium itself, you see a canvas where you can become an artist *cough*, a master of the craft, or else you can get very unsettled and try to go and seek the answers, the ways that prevent the ills and wrongs and heartbreaks and destructions, mythological-like plots that almost all are fed by and found in successful blockbusters (exhibitionistically) and indie films. It is when you get poisoned by seeking responses, and getting beyond what is shown on the silver screen *amen* that you have to depart from the craft itself, give up an artist and master of the craft titles (or hats) and go check other horizons.

Questions, that are the lifeblood of curiosity and that underpin my brain lining, makes you hit different corners, wander here and there, appear vagabond to others, irresponsible to others, while all you do is selfishly seek a relief for the unsettled quests, answers to the questions sometimes unposed. It happens so that law appeared to be a perfect study for it. While the way I ended up there doesn’t attest to that, it is the real reason for me. Ideally, law builds itself on the common understanding of and on larger organization of society, it has a defined order within it, and it provides remedies to the ills, better say, it is built to provide remedies by the way it operates. Yes of course, I also hear that law is a real life job with real life people and stories involved, and oh-how-hard it is to disagree with that statement, but to my study, whether you deal with a fiction, a hypothetical (for lawyers) or read a case or a screenplay, you see one common thing - dry events and statements only. For film it is a present tense of screenplay and for case law it is fact pattern of the case. Beyond these dry lines lay all the universes of protagonists and plaintiffs and defendants and even witnesses, that slip away from us or require our mental to build it, feel it, understand it. That meta layer defines what goes into the script, what makes a statute tick and how the case is ruled on. I keep telling myself cases are like scripts too. With law you do not become artist and master of the craft but you become master of lives. That might sound very pretentious and should be hated for it, but it is true, more so in comparison to film. If I constrained myself within a film, I’d become, at best a great storyteller, and I’d become that by only mastering the craftsmanship. Of course in fragmented legal profession you have to master the craft as well, especially in adversarial trial practice and you have to narrow down on a distinct one, but difference is that events and stories are thrown at you and you try to handle them, you try to apply law to them, if law is not working, you try to challenge it, you try to amend it, precedent it. You are the master because you become a servant for life. In film you create your own universe, in law life throws at you the issues and you try to solve them. Probably it doesn’t make sense to you how you can become a master of life, if life is your own master, or why life is your master at all. I abide by the belief that by unconditionally (or almost) submitting yourself to the greater doesn’t put a chain on you, but rather breaks whatever chains otherwise might have been put on you without your consent. And yes life of others collectively is life.

I went to law school because I wanted answers to all things curiosity, and I naively thought I’d find these there. But to my surprise the only answer I got to all the questions in the world was “it depends”. And counterintuitively, getting used to the pain that underpins this answer is why law is so gratifying to the type of a person I am. Parting ways with film, I have to give it a full credit for teaching me the sheer power an ordinary story always holds. It all boils down to the fact that one story of an ordinary person can build and dismantle castles.

The journey always continues, the horizon is never ever reached. And what film, technology and entrepreneurship and law taught me cannot hold itself true, cannot contain itself. Curiosity makes our universe expand, at least it makes mine. For that I’m slave in chains, never settling always chasing the most basic. Current stop is the 2nd law.