One of the hardest things for a lawyer is explaining his or her work to young kids. ‘What exactly do you do?’ It’s not quite as simple as driving a train, or raising crops, or venturing into outer space: all straight-forward, kid-friendly occupations. ‘I draft agreements for people who want to do business together’ or ‘I represent people who need something from the court’ are both valiant efforts at transparency but are likely to leave children below the age of six baffled. ‘I keep robbers out of jail after they’ve been caught by cops’ will prompt howls of indignation from young ‘uns with a well-developed sense of good guys and bad guys.

In my case, I took to resorting to generalities, such as helping people who are in trouble. But this doesn’t really describe what we do, because so many jobs are about helping people
— when they’re sick, or need their TV repaired or car washed. For that matter, running an ice cream stall helps people too
— and in a more immediate and intelligible way. Helping someone draft a contract is just one of many ways people need help. The same point applies to so many of the services we provide — collecting debts, incorporating companies, registering
trade marks.

So the next part of my explanation would focus on the importance of what we do for the people we do them for — and that proved easier than I had feared. An example that seemed to find resonance was that of dealing with bullies. When a bully’s around in the adult world, the law, and lawyers, can be a defence (although bullies too get represented!).

Kids understand readily that the law can help people recover things that others have wrongly taken from them. The next step is to talk about how the law can help protect what’s important — such as animals or the environment. What if the Lorax had been able to go to court and stop the chopping down of the Truffula Trees? Or explain how the law can be used to try to even things up and prohibit discrimination. Could appropriately drafted laws have established harmony and non-discrimination among the Sneetches — both those with stars and those without?

At that point of course, once the kids are thoroughly confused but have some vague idea that what you do is sufficiently important for Dr Seuss to have written about it, the wisest counsel is to shut up, and let the kids get back to their playing — and watch them establish their own rules, and their own system of administering justice. Without adult intervention, ownership rights and sharing obligations still emerge, and kids are very vocal about what is fair or unfair.

I’m firmly convinced of this innate sense of fairness, even though staple reading of my generation was William Golding’s parable, The Lord of the Flies. Schoolboys from a private school are shipwrecked, and they swim to a deserted island where they must fend for themselves. At first they stick together and act reasonably. Then they divide into two camps. One camp is led by Ralph, a little liberal humanist. The other is led by Jack, a miniature free market economist. Those who follow Ralph believe in decency and civilisation, while followers of Jack paint their faces, sharpen their spears and become militarists. Despairing of ever being rescued, the boys go to war with one another, with deadly results and victory, it seems, for the pessimistic notions that society conceals but does not eradicate ‘the beast within’ and that the natural state of man is brutish and cruel. But perhaps the conditions for this descent into barbarity are fear of the unknown lurking on the island, and the absence of hope of rescue, and neither of these conditions are generally applicable. So that even left to themselves, children quickly acquire a sense of right and wrong in their treatment of and by siblings and friends.

One of the traditional sources of inculcation of ‘playing by the rules’ is sport, and games too provide a useful analogy for explanation to kids of what a lawyer’s job is — except lawyers act less as referees than as advocates for or against athletes accused of doping, or missing dope tests.

This brings me in this Olympic year to a new area where lawyers can be of help. Sports law is a rapidly expanding field in the UK and the US, and offers opportunities for Singaporean lawyers too. But if we are to make our mark, we will need to think regionally and internationally, because it hardly makes business sense to limit our share of the legal market to the share of sports medals that our home-grown sportsmen and sportswomen manage, however valiant and brave they may be. Nonetheless, one day, explaining to kids what lawyers do may be as simple as saying: ‘You know those guys who sort out when medals are won fairly or unfairly, who make sure the rules of the game are followed, well I do the same sort of thing as they do.’

Philip Jeyaretnam, SC
President
The Law Society of Singapore