It Ends in Suits (How Law Firms Buy the Best Students)
It's 2016 and I'm at a networking event run by one of the major law firms in Sydney, Australia. Around me, canapés are being served by waiters in tuxedos. They ask me if I would like the salmon tartar. I politely decline. It's a formal event, so I am dressed in my one and only ...
Australia’s Bushfire Crisis
It is difficult to talk about the current bushfire crisis facing Australia with anything close to the objectivity required of a journalistic article. As my home, I have struggled to come to grips with the scope of the disaster that has occurred here. For a long time, we have had the benefit of sitting on ...
Before you go to law school… read this (Or: Should I go to law school?)
So you want to go to law school. You’ve spent years watching legal dramas, stomach tingling at every argument spoken in a Hollywood courtroom. You’ve honed your skills in argumentation, practicing on your parents, siblings and intellectually inferior friends. You’ve trodden through the history books, digging out biographies of Nelson Mandela, Gandhi and Jefferson. You ...
How to Fix Law Schools in Australia: A Few Recommendations
For the last three years, I have been writing a PhD on how to fix legal education in Australia. The core of my thesis has been the creation of a new liberal arts law school curriculum, addressing concerns that the current curriculum is too "corporate" or "vocational" in focus. Below are the key recommendations from ...
How To Get a Job As a Generalist
I've had various people write to me following the release of my TEDx video earlier in the year. The most common question by far has been about how to get employed as a generalist. Often, the person concerned has built up a diverse range of skills, experiences and knowledge bases and wants to know how to ...
Lawyers in the Media: A Comparison of American and Australian Representations of Justice
In 1984, international human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson shot the first episode of his critically acclaimed Hypotheticals TV series on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (‘the ABC’).[1] The show was a landmark of its time. In each episode, Robertson posed a series of hypothetical questions to a panel of high-profile public officials: politicians, police chiefs, community ...
Why Do Tech Companies Want to Read Our Minds? (Brain-computer interfaces, surgical implants and the end of privacy)
We are free to think whatever we want. From a young age, we are told that no one else can know what we are thinking. Someone can study our actions, our facial expressions and our body language, but they can never know for sure what we are thinking. Our thoughts are private and secure, and ...
How Australia Became a Conservative Nation
The year is 2014 and Tony Abbott, the Australian Prime Minister, announces a series of cuts to public spending across healthcare, education and unemployment benefits. Modeled off of the austerity programs sweeping Europe at the time, the cuts aimed to balance the federal budget and privatize public services. The UK, Greece, Spain and Portugal have all adopted ...
4 Ways to Innovate: Lessons from the Global Scholars Symposium
In June 2019, Rhodes House hosted the Global Scholars Symposium. The theme was Cultivating Innovation. Over the two-day event, speakers from all over the world talked about different ways to innovate. I left the event with a newfound appreciation for innovators, and several take-home messages. According to the dictionary, to innovate is to “make changes in ...
There is a Logical Fallacy at the Heart of the Case Method
This post was originally from the Oxford Political Review here. Since the late 1800s, the best law schools in common law countries have taught law by way of the case method. Invented by Professor Christopher Columbus at Harvard Law School, the case method is based on the idea that law can be understood by reading ...
