Editor’s Note: Read this Letter and more in Letters of the Law: An Anthology, coming to you in August 2020!
Nick is currently a lawyer with a leading firm in Singapore, and advises in the field of intellectual property, technology and data. Nick also teaches as an Adjunct Faculty with his alma mater from time to time, specialising in the intersection of legal theory, philosophy, ethics, and social responsibility. He routinely serves on various volunteer committees of the Law Society of Singapore amongst other pro bono projects.
An alumnus of the Singapore Management University (SMU), Nick graduated within the top 10% of his LLB cohort. He was awarded the Tan Keng Feng Prize for Top Student in Jurisprudence, the Kwa Geok Choo Undergraduate Scholarship, the Wee Chong Jin Scholarship in Law, the Tan Book Teik Prize for Top Student in Constitutional & Administrative Law, and the WongPartnership LLP Scholarship in Law.
This Letter is addressed to his younger self, during his first semester of law school.
Dear Nick,
This is only your first semester of law school and you’re already strutting about the library with a chip on your shoulder. You feel like you need to punch above your weight or be knocked out. You’re constantly on edge, frustrated as your hungry heart pulls you in every direction. To borrow the words of Roberto Unger: you feel like you’re struggling in the world and against it; you feel like you may die many small deaths in each decision you make; and you’re quietly terrified that you’ll become hostage to all the people who may rebuff your love or destroy your work. I know.
Despite (and indeed, because of) your disenchantment now, I urge you to earnestly seek true joy till your soul thirsts, till your flesh faints, till you learn to become very suspicious of counterfeit pleasures that do not truly satisfy. I promise you that if you seek, you shall find; and right now, you desperately need to find your anchor to believe, to hope, to endure, so that you can discover how to be fearlessly genuine. You need to know that you were called by name to an ordained destiny even before you felt you needed to prove yourself. Your life is a calling. Without such faith, you’d become unmoored. Anyone would.
And I understand that you still believe that you’re the shrewdest person in the room. But believe me, here’s where your untethered cynicism and nihilism will take you from now: by the second year, your pride would have seduced you to worship and sacrifice to the insatiable gods of control, acceptance, and friendship. Your fear would soon push you to take hostages of those you call friends, to rebuff the love of those who care for you, and to destroy your own work. And whilst (for a time) you sincerely believed that you love your friends zealously, you’d have actually become insufferable in your desperation to be everything to everyone and have everything and everyone.
It would have been too late by the time you realise that all your bridges have been scorched to dust, and that C.S. Lewis was probably right that love begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god.
But the good news is that you’ll become wiser through your many failings. The better news is that goodness and mercy will pursue you all the days of your life even if you don’t deserve it. You’ll have a season to heal, to reflect, and to rebuild. Many who had witnessed you at your worst would later affirm that you’ve become discernibly mellower in heart. Repentance motivated by hardship (even if self-inflicted) will make you a better friend to many, and adversity will reveal the closest of friends – the kinds you could never make whilst you were still a brute. And years from now, if asked about your law school experience, you’d routinely quote Oscar Wilde (completely out of context!) to declare, unabashedly, that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
So, freshman, you’re in for quite a bumpy ride. But don’t worry, it’s going to be worthwhile—you’ll eventually discover that all things truly work together for good according to a purpose that transcends both your worst failings and your best ambitions.
You’ve just entered a crucible of legal education that would significantly shape the character of your future lawyering (and teaching!), but only because you’re going to have the blessing of being mentored by erudite professors whose own hearts have been set ablaze by a true love of the Law (not cold hearts dead in realism). Find them and listen to them. These angels would be the reasons you’d eventually come to have faith in a romantic, even teleological, view of the legal enterprise. They would be the reasons you would end up debating about morality with your bosses even in the most routine of (taken-for-granted) matters in the years to come, challenging the worldviews of your colleagues.
7 years from now, the inscription on your desk in your office would sum up the man you’d aspire to be: to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly in all your ways, as a friend, a lawyer, a scholar, a teacher, and a human being.
Why not start now?
Love,
Nick (2020).