Fig 1 showing professor G.O White.
As a prerequisite to writing my paper coming in two weeks, I got the chance to interview one of the most important professors alive in our times, or rather say in my world. This is because his unique upbringing and his life history have left an incredible and indelible mark on his passion for work, admirable performances and his legendary professionalism in his fights to uphold the law, Professor Geoffrey O white. He is a political science professor at Harvard University and my whole time career target. Professor White is no longer a law teaching professor despite having a chain of degrees behind him, working as a lawyer and also teaching in law in the past made him my right choice a person to interview. As a matter of fact, I came to find out that he had previously written a number of lawsuits on behalf of his many clients and did also publish review articles under his name.
I was surprised the way the interview began. Normally I thought I was to ask the questions first but he took me by surprise when he actually suggested that I should tell him the kind of law I wanted to write about. My aim was to write generally about the law but talking to him made me turn my focus and look from his perspective where I learned that there were many commonalities across the different types of laws ranging from civil rights to criminal.
Throughout the interview, White kept on taking a few excusable breaks in order to consult legal books of which I came to find this part interesting. When I mentioned during the interview that my thought had always been that people always learned in law school, he dismissed saying law school is more of teaching and learning legal concepts and one of the tricks with vocabulary is the real deal of having the resources from which you will extract the vocabulary you require.
According to White, writing legally and in a solid way is the ability to be straightforward at the same time being passionate. He went ahead to suggest that attaining this stand is one the difficult things to do since balancing this is a problem. I rem he gave me one example that was about writing a legal brief to a judge where one might say, “The only reasonable interpretation of the evidence is in favor of my client, therefore, In order to be consistent with prior court rulings, you must rule in favor of my client.” Professor White made it clear that this was a nice way of approaching the church and in turn, he or she will likely be a winner in that case.
I enquired from White on the point view specifically since I understand the Supreme Court has its opinions in the first person. In his response, he said that judges do that when they hand down an opinion but most of the attorneys fail to the same. One of the things I noted through the entire interview was the fact that White kept on reiterating that legal writing isn’t “as difficult as half the way people think it is.” He said this and it sounded as if it was like learning a new language mostly foreign. His admission that lawyers are actually not as wise as people think though he couldn’t explain further.
Nevertheless, I expect that this interview will really help me write my paper, specifically in the areas of style, tone, and use of specialized vocabulary. Moreover, White was able to point me towards other resources I will be able to use to research my paper and make the best out of it.
