Procrastination: A Means to an End
Pro-bloody-crastination; even saying the word seems like a waste of time. So as I’m sat here, music blaring, laptop on and the workload piling up, a familiar battle takes place – do I give in to the lures of popular entertainment, stroll the internet and engage in that constantly enticing Facebook stalk… or should I buckle to the ever-growing pressure of university work?
To the outsider, the answer would seem pretty obvious – after all, we’re paying three grand for the joys of study, and as we’re constantly reminded by the ‘come and join us’ nature of the big law firms, our hard work will one day pay off.
Or will it?
The issue with all work and no play is that we know exactly what we’re getting – hell, all that’s needed is a couple of contours, and our life is practically mapped out: do the work, beat the competition, and get the job. There would be no complaints here if the job was one of variation and intrigue, but ask anyone who’s meandered their way through the latest trust law bestseller, and they’ll tell you: law is boring.
Initially, this principal is difficult to come to terms with, and a complicated process of self denial is generally employed by the law student, forcing themselves to believe that they haven’t confined themselves to three years of sheer boredom, or in the worst cases, a lifetime of legal entertainment. Unfortunately, such self denial can often subsist, and even grow, leading the said law student to commit themselves to an, albeit generously paid, training contract, in one of the unaptly named ‘magic circle’ firms.
Indeed, the money to some is the selling point; preying upon the value which they attach to social freedom, as opposed to those of eternal riches. Give more weight to the latter and the legal worlds for you – but if any doubts are being housed; well, it’s essential for one to look beyond the dull settings of the court room and its legal offerings.
Any retrospective life wanderer will tell you that lack of money can be compromised with the richness of life; have a good one, building on the freedoms of choice and lifestyle, and a dwindling bank account will be a mere blemish in your life story. However, choose the lure of hefty wage slips in London’s legal network, and it may be that the endless hours spent sifting your way through countless legal volumes will be the determining basis for the middle, and end, of life’s unwritten novel; in which there will most certainly not be any spare pages for the self-indulging art of procrastination.
Alex Carlile has certainly lived a rich and varied life. A King’s alumnus, he took silk at the age of just thirty-six and is now Head of Chambers at 9-12 Bell Yard, a Deputy High Court Judge, a Liberal Democrat peer and the independent reviewer of terror legislation. I met him in the foyer of Southwark Crown Court. 
Moazzam Begg spent just over three years in extra-judicial detention in Guantánamo Bay and other US detention camps. He was subjected to over three hundred interrogations and narrowly avoided being sent to torture camps in Egypt and Libya. In 2005, he was released without charge, compensation or even an apology and today remains subject to a control order. It is the sort of treatment that could radicalise the most placid of moderates. Yet when I met Moazzam, I found him to be rational, eloquent and, most ironically, a staunch advocate of traditional ‘Western’ freedoms. 
So here you are. The summer of anticipation is finally over and you have arrived at King’s College London to embark on a law degree and are exploring both university and city life. Is it all going as you expected? This has been the year that you have left home, the ever so slightly overprotective parents, friends you have known forever and the rest of your comfort zone. But it’s also the year that you get to live your lives with few or no responsibilities, so make the most of it because this sheer and utter freedom is what it’s all about. 
For years the people of Burma have been without a voice. Protests and marches, whose aims fall under the umbrella of ‘pro-democracy’, are common, but why is it that on this particular occasion, the faces of Burmese Monks have become so familiar? 
I sit staring at the crumpled pile of paper advertising events and clubs and societies from the Students’ Union languishing in a pile on my table after a busy fortnight of Fresher’s events. How bizarre, that I should be racking my head over the equally messed up idea of freedom. 
The notion of freedom is so broad and springs from such a great wealth of sources that it would seem impossible not to be able to say something – anything – about it. Yet when it comes to articulating that first word there is a lengthy pause … where do you even begin? What is ironically frustrating is that many of those who have the most intriguing insights into this colossal concept are often the very people who have experienced the curtailing or even the complete deprivation of their own personal freedom. How can we even pretend to understand something so fundamental when we have spent our entire lives taking it for granted? For many, the time-honoured cliché of putting oneself in another’s shoes simply cannot apply here. 
Prima facie, the Chief Medical Officer’s initiative to save more lives by presuming people willing to have their organs removed after they die and transplanted into those who need them seems a good idea. However as the glaze of goodwill peels away, potentially undesirable elements emerge. It does appear strange that a country that prides itself on liberty would implement a law that exerts its authority over the organs of a person without their active consent. But would ratification of this proposal actually affect our individual rights? And if so, are those rights outweighed by the urgency of the need to donate organs? 
There are not many instances in my life where I can say that I have participated in a historically significant event. When Diana died, I was not one of the thousands who lined the streets. When England won the Rugby World Cup in 2003, I watched the celebrations on the television from the comfort of my living room. When the suicide bombers attacked London on the 7th July 2005, I was not on my way to work or school; I heard about it at home on the radio. So over the summer it was strange to be inadvertently caught up in the first bank run since the collapse of Overend and Gurney in 1866. While queuing outside my local branch of the Northern Rock I was uniquely placed to witness the operation of the freedom of speech and the freedom to act irrationally and it has enhanced my understanding of the way our society works. 
Freedom is rarely absolute. We only need to compare the rights we are afforded in this society with the restrictions placed on us to see that. Thomas Paine once said, ‘He who would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from repression’. Herein lies the problem of balancing freedoms. In our post-9/11 world, we witness this balance on a regular basis as we are forced to confront the question of just what civil liberties we are prepared to give up in order to live free from terrorism. In July I went to Nagorno Karabakh, an Armenian populated area about the size of Scotland within Azerbaijan’s borders and began to learn about the problems that arise when opposing notions of freedom collide on an international scale.