MRes Social Anthropology, 2017
BA Archaeology and Anthropology, 2015
What is your current role?
I am a barrister at 4 New Square Chambers, which specialises in commercial and public law. I started out doing criminal law in a chambers that did public work, inquests and inquiries.
I have worked on a wide range of sensitive and high-profile cases, including representing former postmasters whose convictions were overturned relating to the Bates and Ors v Post Office Limited litigation, and acted as junior counsel to the Covid-19 Inquiry and Undercover Policing Inquiry.
What has been your career pathway since graduating?
I had a year out between my undergraduate and master’s degrees and spent six months in Cape Town, South Africa, where I worked for a charity which assisted migrants, asylum seekers and refugees.
After my MRes degree I did a law conversion course before studying for the Bar, after which I became a self-employed barrister.
How has anthropology influenced your work?
Anthropology has had a direct bearing on my work as a barrister.
This was especially true when I worked in crime, where you really push up against direct stereotypes and forms of bias. Criminal law is about disputes and the job of the barrister is to contextualise what’s happened from different sides, interpretations and perspectives. Context is everything – that’s a general legal principal – and it’s really easy to miss if you don’t have a humanities grounding.
Anthropology has also taught me that forms of expertise are inherently limited. In legal cases we rely on experts all the time. As the barrister, my role is to navigate multiple frameworks of understanding, to draw on the right experts, to be aware of blind spots, to ask the right questions. Anthropology has deeply informed my approach to that.
What’s your advice for current and future anthropology students?
I cannot recommend an anthropology degree more highly. I wholeheartedly believe that anthropology sits really well with law. Being a lawyer is so much more than a specific skill set acquired through legal training. It is narrative and common sense driven. You need to ask: what’s reasonable? What makes sense? What seems plausible? You need to be able to present in a compelling way to your audience, be it the public, a judge or a jury.
Don’t think that you need to study law at undergraduate level. My advice would be to develop a different skillset so you can bring something unique to large legal teams. You’ll spend the rest of your life studying law.
The law is a practical skill you can pick up. You want to make sure you develop your intellectual skills too: you need both to work at levels of abstraction and practicality. Anthropology straddles both ways of thinking and how to link them together, and that’s the beauty of it.
Studying anthropology has been determinative of how I think about problems and how I express myself. It’s even influenced how I do legal writing – which is just writing. In a holistic sense, it’s far more important than anything you might learn in an eight-month law conversion. I’d recommend it to anyone.
