“I got bored of rules”

I got bored of rules. Well yes I did but not recently. I think I probably got bored of rules a long long long time ago. I got bored of rules the minute I figured out that most of them make no sense, that most of them serve no real purpose, that most of them are bad rules. Was I a pain in the arse child that constantly asked why? I honestly don’t know – ask my parents. I am, like we all are full of contradictions though. I mean it seems a bit odd for someone bored of rules to study law, right? And perhaps even odder then for someone bored of rules to teach law. It’s also odd for someone bored of rules to have coined #MyRunMyRules as their running mantra. So here’s where the blog post splits – keep reading here for my academic-y stuff and click over the my running blog for the running rules stuff.

So what does being bored of rules mean for a legal academic? It’s an interesting one that. I’ve never found rules per se interesting. Law as rules is boring. What is interesting is how we engage with rules, how they impact on our lives and how we choose to navigate that. So when I say I got bored of rules I think what I mean is that I got bored of engaging with rules, particularly rules which I believe are pointless and at best serve no real purpose and at worst do significant damage to us. In the context we were talking in in the therapy session a number of things could have triggered that statement. I am bored of the supposed rules about teaching infrastructure – that our lectures are x minutes long, our workshops the same, that our workbooks for students basically should look the same, that assessment rules stipulate world length for levels etc. Most of these rules serve no useful purpose at all. I am also bored of law as rules. Law is so much more and learning about law shouldn’t be about learning rules. It should be about learning to think about rules and what they mean, how they come to exist and if, why and how there could be better rules, or no rules or just different rules.

I am bored of traditional, outdated, flawed ways of thinking about law and law teaching. I am bored of university rules or rather of engaging with them as if they matter. Mostly they don’t. More and more often I find myself thinking about how things could be better – how do we make changes that really matter – how do we change the rules? What sort of rules should there be? Should there be any? What are the meaningful rules that we need to make a university work? I’m pretty sure they’re not rules about logo placement, about what the VLE looks like or the number of words students have to write at any given level. I wonder if there have to be rules about lectures and seminars and what learning happens when (as if that could ever be a meaningful rule anyway) and I wonder if rules about student attendance really mean anything. What happens when we don’t follow the rules? What happens if we pretend they don’t exist, if we try and think much more creatively about what we want to do in our law schools, why we want to do it and how. What would the rules look like if we did that?

I know I flirt with breaking rules or ignoring them a lot of the time but I am beginning to get a sense that that’s not enough. That doesn’t change the rules, they’re still there being pointless at best and obstructive to good teaching and research, to collegiality and our collective and individual sanity most of the time. I think we probably need something more. I don’t really know what that looks like though because for now I am simply very very very bored of rules at work and in my work. I’m getting irritated and I am getting angry about rules too and I think I need to work through this more fully before I can get to re-writing the rules – by which I mean mostly scrapping the rules because most of them really are just pointless and destructive.

I think.