New York, May 9.
I had just wrapped up the UIA conference on legal wellbeing: two days of reflections on ourselves, our performance, and the extent to which many lawyers end up identifying entirely with the work they do.
Not exactly the healthiest survival strategy.
After the conference, I was having lunch with a couple of friends/speakers/attendees, all lawyers, when one of them turned to me and asked, almost casually: “Why did you choose law school?”
So I told them a story. Well, “the” story.
After lunch, I thought: Yeah, maybe I should write a post about that.
So here we are.
A bit of context first, because it matters. In Italy, there is no such thing as “college” in the American sense. You finish high school and go straight to university. So you choose immediately: chemistry, biology, engineering, law, medicine, literature, philosophy, economics. Three, five, sometimes six years. That is it.
I had done classical studies in high school, so when the time came to choose, I genuinely did not know what to do. In front of me sat four possible lives and four possible faculties: literature, philosophy, medicine, law.
That said, and before I explain how I ended up in law school, I need to talk about the two things I did not choose, because they shaped everything else.
The first elephant in the room was sports, which I love.
You are supposed to start young if you want a real career in sports, and while I have always been decently athletic, I never had the discipline required to pursue it seriously. The discipline came later in life, much later than it should have. Some doors close quietly before you even realize they were open. I still watch the Olympics and wonder what life would have looked like with a gold medal around my neck. I will never know. And that is simply a fact, unless one day I become obsessively devoted to some obscure discipline nobody has heard of. Even then, it would still be almost impossible.
The second possibility, and by far the most important one, was an artistic career. Mainly in music and poetry. I have spent the last twenty years asking myself why I never pursued art full-time, or at least tried to make a serious profit from it. The honest answer is that it came down to a combination of four things: perfectionism, the unpredictability of artistic success, my relationship with my father, and my ego, especially the way I react to applause, compliments, recognition, flashing lights. Paradoxically, I have always been more afraid of success than of failure, because success can be deeply dangerous if you are not psychologically equipped for it. That said, there is still light there. Maybe one day I will publish some of the things I have written. Maybe all of them. Or maybe I will burn everything instead. Life has surprised me too many times for me to rule anything out.
So there I was again: literature, philosophy, medicine, law.
First, I crossed out literature and philosophy, and the reason was painfully practical: career prospects.
I love teaching. And that feeling has always been with me. But at eighteen I thought, wrongly, as I would later realize, that teaching was basically the only path those degrees offered, and that did not feel like enough.
I want to emphasize the “wrongly” here, because it took me years to understand this properly: university is not really about the job you will do afterward. Or at least it is not for me.
University is a way of structuring your mind.
In engineering, you learn to think in systems and processes. In philosophy, you learn to think about thinking itself. In law, you learn to think about ethics, conflict, power, interpretation.
Yes, there is a profession waiting at the end of the road. But the deeper gift is the shape your mind takes along the way. At eighteen, though, I was still trapped inside the idea that university had to lead directly to a profession. So the choice narrowed itself down to medicine and law.
Medicine would have required studying all summer for the entrance exam, and honestly, I wanted to enjoy that summer. It also meant spending the first year buried in biology and mathematics before getting to the subjects that fascinated me most: anatomy, pathology, the human body itself. It felt like a very long runway for someone who was not fully convinced.
Law, by contrast, looked easier.
Mostly oral exams. And I love speaking.
A huge amount of memorization. And my memory has always been unusually strong.
Then there was Bologna. I was living in one of the oldest and most prestigious university cities in the world, home to one of the best law schools anywhere.
Last but not least, since this is supposed to be an honest piece of writing, I should probably admit one more thing.
There were 1,200 students. Most of them came from other cities. Around 70% were women. This was before dating apps, back when meeting people still meant physically meeting people.
Should I include this in a blog post? Maybe not. But sincerity is the whole point of personal writing, and if I am telling the story truthfully, then this belongs to the story too.
Medicine, however, never really disappeared from my life.
Over the years I have spent hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours studying things that became parallel passions of mine: traditional Chinese medicine, neuro-linguistics, phoniatrics.
I still love all of them.
Maybe one day I will go back and get a degree. Maybe not. I do not need degrees anymore to validate my ego. What I know is that I love the human body, and I love the idea of healing, both for others and for myself. That is twenty-five years of reflection compressed into one paragraph, and probably material for several future posts.
Believe me, if this were a beautiful story about following in the footsteps of my parents, or being inspired by great lawyers like Lincoln, Mandela, or Gandhi, I would happily tell it that way.
But it would not be true.
My father is an engineer who became manager/director/ceo. My mother is a teacher. No lawyers in my family. No legal dynasty. I entered law school completely cold.
And then something unexpected happened.
I sat my first exam: Constitutional Law. 30 out of 30.
Second exam: Philosophy of Law. 30 out of 30.
Third exam: Roman Law. 30 out of 30.
Fourth exam: Political Economy. 30 out of 30 cum laude.
At some point I remember thinking: “You know what? This is actually pretty good.”
Of course it was. And not only for the grades.
The point is that somewhere during those first exams, I discovered something I had not expected at all: I genuinely loved law (well, more natural than positive law…).
I loved learning. I loved understanding systems. I loved the architecture of rules and institutions, the invisible framework that allows societies to function. Before I knew it, law started shaping the way I looked at everything: people, conflict, fairness, responsibility.
Those university years were among the happiest and most intellectually pleasurable years of my life.
And yet, when I graduated, I still did not really know what I wanted to do afterward.
When I started university, I assumed it would clear a path for me. It did not.
Oddly enough, I do not think there is anything wrong with that anymore, although it took me years to believe it.
That, too, is probably another story.
So this is the answer to the question my friend asked me at lunch.
I chose law because it was the easiest among the serious options. Because Bologna was beautiful. Because I love speaking and interacting with people. Because I have a good memory. Because it was full of strangers who eventually became friends, and sometimes girlfriends. And because I had absolutely no idea that what I was really choosing was not a profession, but a way of thinking.
I am glad I chose it.
Not mainly because of the career, although I am grateful for the career.
But because of the shape it gave my mind.
And the rest, as they say, has simply been life continuing to surprise me.
P.S. Did you know that Scott, Stevenson, Grisham, Kafka, Goethe, and Turow all had a legal background? Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. At least for this blog…
Pic from the lunch 😉.
