Defining and Refining Yourself as a Legal Scholar

In this talk Professor Stapleton will reflect on the landscape of possibilities a legal scholar navigates as he or she develops their career. Using what she calls her own “idiosyncratic” trajectory as illustration, she will touch on a wide range of choices such as the level of abstraction of ideas, inter-disciplinary avenues, jurisdictional breadth, audience and forms of communication. Along the way she will describe how the experiences of graduate research – such as the gruelling tests of morale – are an invaluable preparation for the challenges and fluctuating fortunes of a legal scholar’s career.

Chair: Dr James Goudkamp, Shaw Foundation Junior Research Fellow in Law, Jesus College, Oxford and Faculty of Law