Why I Switched from Law to the Humanities

Disappointed by a field that had become overly technocratic and by the marginalization of the self-employed, I decided to abandon my law studies after only five days. Here is a plea in favor of literature, history, and a more humanistic education.

If someone mentions a college professor, you’ll likely picture a man with a silver mane, dressed in a tweed suit and carrying a heavy briefcase with worn leather under his arm. He approaches the lectern in front of him awkwardly, his mind consumed by a dozen thoughts that seem to distance him from the reality of the lecture hall he has just entered. Yet as soon as he begins to speak in his quavering voice, silence falls. For two hours, he captivates his audience by delivering a lecture from memory, peppered with brilliant references and Latin phrases. At least, that’s what I expected when I decided to begin my law studies at the University of Fribourg.

At the time, I was convinced that the study of our legal practices was a humanistic discipline—that is, that it would allow me to draw upon knowledge specific to classical languages and the humanities as a whole—in short, to the enduring nature of the human condition.

An industry that is more compartmentalized than it seems

Yet, from the very first classes of my program—taught in German and French—I was confronted with the German-speaking professors’ efficiency and rigor as they taught in the language of Goethe. For them, law was nothing more than a matter of logic, of true or false, of existing legal texts. To hear them tell it, this austere subject forbade any critical thinking or oratory from those who practiced it. The only deviation permitted was to offer a few modest nuances on certain points of doctrine—scholarly commentaries on the provisions contained in our laws.

Unfortunately, I had still not shaken off the naivety of a novice when I entered the university library reserved for law students. I had hoped to find law books there whose lively style and political, philosophical, or historical perspectives might shed light on my early steps in the discipline.

After a long and fruitless search, I was forced to admit that even the books on Swiss constitutional law lining certain shelves did not all address issues related to our democratic system. The discovery of thick volumes on tax law, contract law, and insurance law—written in dry, technical French—left me utterly perplexed.

Career Prospects for Law Students

However, I would not have decided to give up my law studies after only five days if I hadn’t remembered the reason that had initially led me to the field of law. It was the desire to pursue a career as a diplomat or to participate in public discourse by, for example, entering the political arena. However, the discussions I had with older classmates quickly made it clear to me that this program was primarily designed to prepare me to become a corporate lawyer, an in-house counsel, a prosecutor, or a judge.

I then realized with alarm that the legal profession is no longer the independent profession it once was. The students I spoke with assured me that lawyers today often choose not to go into private practice because they are unable to compete with large law firms, which have substantial resources to handle the cases entrusted to them. Consequently, these firms enjoy greater credibility with their clients. This, my classmates assured me, is what leads a significant number of recent graduates to seek employment at large firms or to work for the government as judges or prosecutors.

Letters lead to everything

Given these accounts—some of which ultimately dissuaded me from continuing my studies—I can’t help but wonder if my experience would have been different a few decades ago. It is likely that the professors of that time were very eager—though some still are today—to provide an education faithful to the classics and sometimes grounded in literary considerations. If so, I might have appreciated the emphasis those teachers placed on rhetoric and the natural way in which they linked law to the humanities. It was teachers like these who nurtured the talents of great litigators, such as Maurice Garçon, Jean-Denis Bredin, or, more recently, Jean-Yves Le Borgne and François Sureau.

Since I hadn’t encountered any teachers in my German classes who were worthy of inspiring these leading figures of the bar, I decided instead to model myself after men whose achievements I admired—the writer and diplomat Paul Morand, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and the British politician Douglas Hurd—and opted instead for a degree in history combined with political science. This solution seemed to me to be the only one that would suit my needs, since it gave me the freedom I desired to pursue a wide variety of careers, just as some of my heroes had done before me.

Founder of the Cercle fribourgeois de débat et de rhétorique (Fribourg Debate and Rhetoric Society), Antoine Lévêque is an editor at Regard Libre.

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