Playing with Law: A tribute to Fran Wright
It has been a difficult few days. On Monday morning I woke up to the news I had been trying to prepare myself for but which I was never going to be ready for: My former colleague and dear friend Fran Wright had died. That was news that I had hoped wouldn’t come since we heard that Fran was seriously ill. It was the news that I thought might not come after she was making what seemed to be an amazing recovery (of course she was going to get better – this is Fran we’re talking about). But it came nonetheless and as another amazing woman lost quite recently once said about death: ‘Her loss is as unfathomable as everything else’ (with thanks to Dr Emma Lindley).
Fran was kind and supportive when I first started working at Bradford Uni Law School. She was so full of enthusiasm for teaching law, for research, for life. Her creative approach to law and legal rules is something that left an impression. I remember problem questions about pink unicorns, lectures about quilting and feminist legal reasoning and wine spilled over exam papers. I remember giggles and peeing your pants kind of laughing. We worked together and wrote together (not nearly enough), we had dinner every now and again (she was an excellent cook), we exchanged tomato plants as easily as we exchanged ideas and she is still one of the very few people who has seen me attempt the hula hoop on the Wii Fit. The one thing though that is, in my mind at least, her legacy, is her ability to play with the law and teach others to do so. She re-ignited my passion for legal rules, for knowing the law and for spending time actually engaging with statutes and cases. And that’s because she reminded me that good lawyers (academic or practitioners) are creative. That using law to make an argument is an incredibly creative process and that it is the most innovative use of law which drives research forward. That is exciting! Fran Wright taught me how to play with law through our discussions, debates, our giggles and our chats. She reminded me that law is fun. At the same time I watched her teach our students the same and had the privilege of co-designing and co-teaching a module with her. The module still exisits and I will continue teaching it as long as I can.
I feel lost without her. A bright star in legal scholarship and legal education has burned out – but the idea of playing with law shines on and I hope I can inspire creativity in law and legal study in the future because I can think of no better way to honour an amazing woman who died far too young.
Teaching EU Law?
It looks like I will again be teaching EU law next academic year. I am sort of excited about this but I am also already thinking and worrying about it. Most students don’t really enjoy EU law and many find it boring and difficult and frankly irrelevant to them. So what am I going to teach and how and why?
Well, we have a first year course which is all about the EU instituions, law making etc – what you might call the instituional, administrative and constitutional elements. Our Level 2 course is a substantive law course which has always focused on free movement of goods, services and persons. I can’t change that too much as the modules are validated along those lines.
So my plan for year one is to focus on the legal elements of EU integration and think about how law and legal processes have pushed the integration agenda. I want to think about power relationships between actors, relationships between institutions and between Member States and the EU and each other. I want to think about gender awareness in this context – well because that’s my thing and because it gives me an angle to make this more engaging.
Year 2 – well I guess I will stick to mostly free movement stuff but I think I will start with questions around EU migration and explore contexts of highly skilled, low skilled, economic activity, other activity, meanings of citizenship etc. Maybe there is scope here to also explore the external dimensions and some Human Rights stuff. I’d like to do less of the goods and services stuff because that’s not where my interest and expertise lies – although there are some cracking cases and having an understanding of the internal market is useful and important.
I’m thinking if not recommending a specific textbook but prepare detailed reading lists based on online material, a fairly detailed module manual and journal articles, blogs as well as some textbook chapters. So, what do you think? Any suggestions for how to make these EU modules stand out, make them interesting and engaging. Suggestions for coverage, approach, materials? What do you do? What works?
Treating people as human beings
I’m preparing for teaching this afternoon and I keep stopping and wondering what the point is. I’m feeling the loss of Dr Emma Lindley really keenly today. I didn’t know her well, we went to the same school, she was kind when I arrived as the new kid but even then she was in a different league. I was aware of her progress through academia, her PhD and her work on mental health. We didn’t meet up or chat on the phone or anything; we were friends on Facebook. Then, roughly 18 months ago my friend Rachel died suddenly. Emma’s post on Facebook in reaction to that news was something like ‘this is as unfathomable as everything else’. In the emotional chaos all around me Emma had somehow managed to capture it all in a simple statement and it was suddenly ok to feel anger and the unfairness of it all and that it didn’t make sense. Emma was there at Rachel’s funeral and her presence somehow helped me. We met for a drink a day or two after, that’s the last time I saw her… and now she’s gone. But this post wasn’t going to be about loss or being sad. It was supposed to be about something far more important and even less tangible than loss: the importance of treating people as fellow human beings, of valuing, not dismissing, taking seriously and being genuine. Both Emma and Rachel, in very different ways, had a knack of connecting with others on a genuine personal level. They could both make you feel like you were the only person in the world that mattered to them and that you were the most important thing at that moment. We all spend so much time rushing around not really taking in the people around us and as a lecturer I often talk to a lecture theatre full of people or a classroom full of students. I see student after student but do I truly engage with them or even see them as individuals, as someone other than a student? Probably nowhere near enough. So today in memory of two amazing young women, I’m not going to have meetings with students, I’m going to have meetings with people; I’m not going to teach my Employment Law class, I’m going to help a group of individuals learn and as I go through the rest of the day and week, maybe, just maybe I’ll manage to convey the same sense of being valued that both Emma and Rachel so often managed to convey to others.
My Conversations 