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I have wanted to be a lawyer for a long time. The story of how I came to that realization is a cute one: Harry Potter features prominently, my mother is another main character, and the rest is a mixture of my interests in politics, government, and a healthy heaping of just plain luck. But that is a story for another day. Instead, I want to discuss what I think the law is, and the things I think it can help me achieve. | | | | |
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< | In the winter of 2001, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone hit theatres worldwide. As an 11 year old in Kampala, Uganda, this new development did not pique my interest. All I had seen was a trailer of a boy in black robes sitting beneath an oversized talking hat. Such was not the stuff that filled my dreams at night; if the power rangers or the X-men were not involved, I probably was not interested. | >
> | For me, the law is nothing more than a means to an end, the end in this case being success. What do I define as success, you ask? Well, the day I will know I have succeeded is the day I can recline in a chair in my own living room with a cold beverage in my hand and with a wife and children that are well taken care of. Is this truly all I want in life? In truth, no – in fact the beverage is strictly optional. But raising a family and having the resources to do so comfortably is the milestone that I am aiming for in the next, say, ten years. | | | | |
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< | What did draw my attention to this movie's release was my brother's uncontrollable excitement to go watch it. As the youngest of four brothers, I always had a particularly competitive relationship with my immediate elder brother. If he liked something, I had to like it more. If he hated it, I despised it. So when my brother was beside himself with glee at the movie's premier, it was imperative that I matched his joy. | >
> | How will I achieve this first milestone? Through the law, of course. How exactly will I use the law to get there? I don’t have the slightest. So I guess the next logical question is what would I use the law for if I could wield it to any purpose I chose? Well, I have never been particularly interested in business, so I know I would not go to a law firm. The only thing I really would have any desire to do with the law is help people. Okay, well and good. Now which people would I help in particular if I could use the law for anything? | | | | |
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< | So you will understand why I was completely distraught when my mother granted my brother leave to go watch the movie, yet simultaneously denied me the permission to do so. When I asked her why, my mother calmly responded, "Have you read the book like your brother has?" | >
> | When I first came to the United States, I landed in Boston, MA, a city with a large population of Ugandans. During my first few months in the country, I frequented a church comprised entirely of Ugandans: some born here in the United States, but most, like me, migrants to the U.S. Unfortunately, more than half of the congregation at this church is undocumented. | | | | |
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< | The first response that came to mind was "Who reads books?" But, even at the age of 11, I had slightly more tact than that. You see, my mother was concerned I did not share the same passion for literature that my brother did. I attempted to assuage her concern by assuring her that I would start reading the book as soon as I got back from the theatre. But never one to be beguiled, my mother gave me the ultimatum that forever changed my life: "If you really want to go watch the movie, read the book." | >
> | Occasionally, non-profit organizations that specialize in aiding immigrant communities will come speak at this church. Their representative, always a white man or woman, will stand at the pulpit and provide details about upcoming information sessions where the undocumented among the congregation can go to receive information about the process. The congregation always listens attentively. They will even applaud on cue after the short talk. But the moment this (usually the only) white man or woman in the church has left, they will laugh amongst themselves at this new deportation trap that they believe the government is trying to spring on them. | | | | |
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< | Muttering words under my breath that my parents would be appalled to discover I knew at that age, I retreated to the bedroom my brother and I shared and picked up his copy of The Sorcerer's Stone. I lay down on my bed and leafed to page 1. It was the first time I had ever voluntarily picked up a book not assigned to me. Well, if you could call that voluntary. And I was determined to hate every second of it. | >
> | The Ugandan community is deeply apprehensive of the government. They love this country, which is why they are so afraid that one day the powers-that-be are going to crack down and send them all back to the motherland. They have a deep-seated mistrust for lawyers, a trait that is not unique to Ugandans, but perhaps more amplified amongst them. There are only two occasions on which the Ugandans in this church usually interact with lawyers: either when one of them has run afoul of the law, or when he/she is found out by the Department of Homeland Security. Without any lawyers in the church, they struggle to find guidance on how to deal with the law and the system. | | | | |
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< | Except that I didn't. I loved it! I could not quite put my finger on it, but something about this book was different. Where the required reading for class was boring and dry, this was almost alive in my hands. The words jumped off the page almost faster than I could read them. The scenes were playing out in my head and exercising my imagination in ways I did not think possible. | >
> | If I could use the law to do only one thing after graduation, it would be to help these Ugandans and all other people like them. The law may be a set of rules, it may be the whims of a judge, or it may be a moral code – ever changing based on whose morality we think is important at any given point in time. But to these people, my people, it is simply the difference between staying in America with their families and all that they have built for themselves, and getting sent back to Uganda. | | | | |
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< | The next time I looked up from the book was to begrudgingly eat a quick dinner before rushing back to my read. It was the first time I had experienced what it meant to find oneself unable to put a book down. In fact, up until that day, I had been quite skilled in the art of putting books down. But not this book: this one stuck. | >
> | So my understanding of the law, despite nearly a year of education at one of the leading law schools in the country, is still quite similar to that of the “bad man” in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “Path of the Law”. It is not that I do not care about the intricacies and history of the law – indeed, I must know them if I hope to succeed at this law school. But every time I return to Boston, none of my fellow Ugandans cares for my views on legislative tort reform versus judicial restraint to reduce frivolous suits. They could not care less about fee simples or fee tails. And they certainly do not want to be bored with talk of which way I think the Supreme Court will rule in Fisher v. University of Texas. All these people want to know is whether that unpaid parking ticket will get him deported, or if enrolling at a community college will put her in the crosshairs of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. | | | | |
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< | And then it was done. I had read and finished the book in a day flat – a definite first for me. I watched the movie the very next day. A fortnight later, I had read all four books that were out at the time. All of a sudden, almost overnight, I was an unstoppable reading machine! Unfortunately, there were no more Harry Potter adventures for me to read yet. But my engines were purring, eager for more and more.
So I picked up The Hobbit. When that was done, I tried my hand at The Fellowship of the Ring and The Silmarillion, but failed. My engines were not equipped to launch me that high just yet, but I was definitely at a cool cruising altitude.
This was also around the time that I started excelling at English in class. All of a sudden, the class made sense. No longer a mindless chore, the class was something I actually looked forward to every week.
In 2006, at a time when the literary force was quite strong in me, I moved to the U.S. I was convinced that I was fated to become a writer. Why else would I have found such a desire and craving if not to use it to author my own works? And why else would my parents bring me to the U.S. but to mold me into the next J.K. Rowling?
It turns out there were plenty of other reasons for my emigration from Uganda. Mostly, my parents wanted me to become successful and have a better life than they did growing up. Something about an "American Dream", I think is what they said. So, not only would my parents not stomach the idea of a budding writer in their ranks, they insisted I put my love for writing, rhetoric and communication to something more feasible. "Why don't you be a lawyer?" my mother often asked of me, "We need a lawyer in the family."
And so, against my better judgment, they somehow convinced me somewhere down the road that I wanted to be a lawyer. I say "convinced" because for a while I did not think it was what I wanted at all. But after a while, I found that there were other things that caught my fancy; the operations of the U.S. government; the penal system and the wages of violating the law; and public policy. After a while, it seemed to me that the law was the perfect intersection of all these elements, while at the same time upholding a love for reading and writing almost as a prerequisite.
It was this combination of factors that led me to law school. Unfortunately, none of it tells me what type of lawyer I want to be. In a sense, really, law school is one big expensive experiment for me: one that I hope will yield results worth getting published.
-- AdrianNtwatwa - 26 Feb 2013
It's a cute story. If you want to be a writer of cute stories, you are at a cool cruising altitude. But if the reader is looking here for something more, she will be mostly disappointed. I don't know whether personal memoir is the right form just now. Perhaps your 11-year-old self is not the best vessel for the expression of the ideas you currently have about law, in which I am, I admit, most presently interested.
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> | So for me, if the law were all about using it to do what I want to do (which I admit it ought to be), then I would learn it and use it first and foremost to help this community. Outside of that, I am not really sure what I would use the law to do. | | | | |
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> | As I have previously intimated, a big challenge for me, as with most other law students, is figuring out how to repay loans. So the challenge for me between now and graduation is to figure out how to do what I want to do with the law without becoming a slave to debt: a thing that I did not think was possible through any way except the firm route before I attended this class. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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