Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) conference Day 1
I have not been to a Society of Legal Scholars conference for some time. I was looking forward to it. I was particularly excited to be able to go to all of the conference rather than just the half in which my paper was scheduled. I am doing 2 papers in the Legal Education section – more on those another time.
Travel to London was uneventful. I like uneventful. I got a fair bit of work done on the train in spite of the supposed quiet coach being the noisiest coach I have been in for a long time. Is it the thing where you’re told you’re not allowed to do something and therefore immediately want to do it? I got the tube out to Mile End and found the campus and even the right building very quickly. I also managed to get a ticket for the dinner at the end of day 1. I hadn’t booked because I wasn’t going to go but then the opportunity for a catch up with Richard C arose so I really wanted to go.
I had arrived in time for lunch – a rather ordinary pasta with a veggie sauce (I think there was a chicken one too) and then I headed to the first session. The first paper was great. I expected it to be. It was a paper by Marc Mason (Westminster) and Steven Vaughan (UCL) reporting on their research with LGBT+ barristers in England and Wales. Bonus points if you ‘get’ the title ‘Going to the Gay Bar, Gay Bar, Gay Bar…’ (if you do, your taste in music is as horrendous as mine!). The paper was fascinating and sort of heartbreaking and a little puzzling…. For a start the survey Marc and Steven did shows quite clearly that the Bar Standards Board statistics on sexuality at the Bar are hugely underestimating the number of LGBT+ barristers across the levels. That in itself means that there is something going on there because some are clearly happy to take part in surveys and interviews for research purposes but are not happy to declare their sexuality as part of the BSB statistics reporting. I wonder why that is. The paper’s sections on homophobia and on the performance of being out were fascinating. The data shows that homophobia is quite common but also that barristers play it down as nothing serious and no big deal. I’m really interested in this lack of advocating for themselves. Where does this come from. Is this a professional thing? Do they advocate for each other? This is fascinating and I’m not sure how we’d get to the bottom of this fully. I’ll ponder this.
I loved the notion that came up in one of the quotes about challenging or disrupting the ‘normal rule of engagements’. So men (mostly) finding it difficult to work out what exactly is going on when faced with a powerful lesbian QC, knowing something is slightly ‘off’ and not being able to work out what the rules of engagement now are. I like that. The section on performance of being out (or not) was depressing because there was lots of evidence of concealing sexuality and lying and because clearly there is a huge amount of the ‘bleached professional’ going on. Where barristers are ‘out’ they are often out in relation to their partners only – so they build their professional gay identity around having a same sex partner rather than on being gay – playing the ‘good gay’ game and performing heteronormativity albeit within a same sex relationship.
The second paper was by Ben Waters (Canterbury Christ Church) on ADR and Civil Justice. I also enjoyed this paper although it’s not really my thing and I was still reflecting on the previous one so drifted in and out.
Anyway it was a fabulous start to the conference. Next I was going to hear more legal education/legal profession stuff and listen to Nigel Duncan (City) on teaching legal ethics but over coffee I realised that I was really flagging. I decided to check into the accommodation and have a little power nap so that’s what I did. Then I headed back to the publisher exhibition area and spent a lovely half hour looking at books (sooooooooo many books, so little time to read….) and then people started filtering in from the sessions for the drinks reception. At the reception I met up with Richard C and we spent the evening talking about well being and anxiety in the legal academy and it was lovely. I left dinner when Richard did and then I went to bed early and fell asleep almost immediately. A good day and a sensible one! I have a blog post started over a year ago on conference self care and I think maybe now is a good time to look at that draft and finish it. I’ll see if I get to it today.
Gender and the CJEU
I’ve been meaning to do this shameless self promotion post since our book was published but somehow never got round to it. But now we are waving the summer off and are hitting the new academic year hard it seems sort of ok to do this. I’m not really keen on the ‘yay look at me’ stuff so this post is really about the book and the process of writing it. If you happen to want to persuade your library to buy a copy or two that would of course be awesome too! You can find it on the Publisher’s website here.
So the book. Well it’s basically an examination of the Court of Justice of the European Union and its work on a couple of substantive law areas and it is written from a feminist perspective. In writing the book we were interested in understanding the role gender plays in the CJEU’s work. The first half sets out our approach and the background – composition of the Court, how it works etc and the second half looks at gender equality case law, equality case law more generally and citizenship case law. If you do read it, we’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
I am really proud of this book – not necessarily because of the content and the writing, I can already see plenty of ways it could all be improved – but because it was such a genuine collaboration and joint effort which proved that collegiality is alive and well and because we were able to work with one of our undergraduate students and use sections of her dissertation as part of our research. It was such a privilege to work with Dr Sanna Elfving who I had appointed and who is an absolute star and with Sophie Mayat, a fabulous former student particularly because I missed supervising most of her dissertation while off sick with depression and anxiety just before I left Bradford. It was amazing to see the hard work she put in and the genuinely high quality research, thinking and writing that she produced.
I learned a lot during the writing of that book. First, it always takes longer than you think it will, a lot longer. Second, I need to work with people who have much more patience than I have a right to ask for. I will at some point in the process fuck up and/or fall off the wagon and I need to trust my co-authors to stick with me, call me out, catch my mistakes and point me back in the right direction. That means they need to have incredible patience and they need to be able to cope with me being a bit of a control freak (ok a lot). Sanna deserves a medal. Third, working with someone who works very differently from me is great. The writing process was really interesting. It seems I map out, Sanna inserted tons of information, I edited, Sanna sorted the references. I had the big picture in my head, she took care of the detail. We are good at different things and that means we can focus on the things we like and are good at but all of it still gets done.
I think the key thing I learned was that a book needs to be really strictly mapped out. We had way too much material and trying to work out how to do it all justice caused some of our issues about structure and the overall argument. Once we decided we would just have to leave some of it out, it actually came together well. We have a couple of ideas for some of the stuff that didn’t make it into the book and definitely have more to say on the subject.
Writing a book is a long slog and I thought that it might be like a PhD or running a marathon – you have to forget the pain before you can even begin to think about doing anything like it again – but actually I’d like to write another one, it was overall a really enjoyable experience. Sure, it had its moments but it was also fun. I have a couple of ideas but lots of research work to do before I can begin to really put pen to paper (probably actual pen to actual paper) but watch this space.
A pretty big day
Today is a pretty big day. No, it’s not a special occasion, I have in fact done very little and nothing has happened – but it is still a big day. I started working in the HE sector some time in August 2004. Ever since that day I have not taken all of my annual leave. Every year it would get to the end of the leave year and I’d have loads left – like double figure days left.
Not this year. My leave year ends at the end of August and today I took my final day’s entitlement. I have used up all of my leave. All of it. Every single day. And I plan to do the same again next year and the year after that and the year after that and every year until I stop working. I love my job. I have been tempted today to read some work related things. It is hard to separate out academic me from me me and there is considerable overlap but I drew the line at a Public Law textbook today – even though I was genuinely interested in how that particular book deals with the rule of law. Anyway, I digress.
So, annual leave. Over the years I never felt like I needed to take it all. I felt like I had plenty of downtime and plenty of time away at conferences and work related stuff. I was young and stupid. Conferences are work and exhausting. Meetings away are not like going on holiday even when they can be combined with an couple of hours getting lost in the Natural History Museum. Not only did I not take all my annual leave, the leave that I did take was often not actually really holiday and switching off. I’ve finished papers from sun loungers (and hospital beds for that matter – fucking idiot); I’ve written teaching materials in hotel rooms and exam questions on flights. I’ve read research papers while sipping a frozen margarita and my holiday reading was always always work related. The downtime I imagined I was having was just that – imagined.
But the thing is, I don’t think that’s sustainable. Well actually I know it is not. It leads to complete exhaustion over time and it makes it so so hard to recover because you unlearn how to relax and have to learn all over again. I have taken all my annual leave and I have felt pretty good all academic year. I have not been ill (I think I might have had a day with a slight tummy issue), anxiety and depression have been mostly fairly low and certainly manageable and my work is, I think, better.
I was away for all of July and most of that was holiday with a short conference stint in the middle. I took my work email off my phone and I didn’t look at it. I took my conference paper and a chapter I was working on with me to look at during the conference period. I didn’t read. Yes that’s right. I did not read. I spent time listening to the sea and the rainforest; I spent time just being; I spent time letting my mind toddle off to wherever it wanted to go; I spent time with Kath and I spent time with me. Less doing, more being. It brings perspective.
I know so many academics who use their annual leave to get stuff done – work stuff I mean. People who actually take a week off to write their teaching materials because they can’t make the time during the day job. That’s wrong. Something is very wrong there. Others who do all of their research during their annual leave. Also wrong. I get cross when I see people in the office on their annual leave and they’ve come in because ‘I just need to do this’. I’m not cross with them. I’m cross with a sector that has normalised overworking to such an extent that the sentence ‘I’m on annual leave but I’m here because I just need to finish x’ doesn’t sound wrong, it sounds normal.
So what did I do with my last day of annual leave in this leave year? Well I didn’t jump out of bed when I woke up but lazily and luxuriously stayed in bed with the cats. When I did get up I went for a long run which felt naughty because long runs are not a Monday thing. I had coffee and watched a TV programme I had recorded in the middle of the day. Then I went to a yoga class and then I watched Snow white and the 7 dwarves – just because. I’ve never really seen it all in one and I’m running the Dopey Challenge in January so I wanted a reminder as to why I like Dopey. I drank more tea and sat with the cats, I pottered about putting bedding and clothes away and books on shelves. I spent time doing nothing at all stroking a cat until I realised that I must have stopped and the cat had long gone.
I have loved today precisely because it wasn’t anything spectacular. It was more being than doing and the doing bits of the day were a being sort of doing. Mostly I loved it because I just left my brain alone. I didn’t ask anything of it and it rested, ready for me to call on it again tomorrow.
Me – Just Being on Manly Beach
My Conversations 