Since I seem to be thinking about things past more than present or future at the moment, before this year’s end I want to mark the 20th anniversary of my blog. I started in 2005, around January, I think, on Blogger. Felt uneasy with the platform though, so quickly moved to Typepad, which was then a much more sophisticated and intuitive platform and renamed the blog Zeugma, after the rhetorical figure and the ancient city that stood at the crossing point of cultures and empires on the Euphrates.[1] I chose the title because I wanted it to reflect the idea of interdisciplinary crossings which has always been at the core of my thinking. My first post on Typepad, which I’m taking as my first post ever because I’ve lost the Blogger items, was posted 17 March 2005. I’ve reproduced it below.
Later I moved the haill jingbang to WordPress.[2] I work part-time now, and so the blog is rather intermittent. When I stop working I’ll stop blogging, for writing, reading, research and education are utterly fused for me, and the blog is a voice for that fusion. I can’t imagine what I might want to say if I stopped any one of these four.
I’ve loved blogging: it’s so flexible and adaptable to academic and practice discourses, and the genre has survived remarkably well over the decades in spite of the endless churn of other social media genres. When I write there’s always some degree of redrafting going on, but it very much depends on the type of piece I’m writing. It’s in personal pieces that I redraft & redraft to get it right, eg The journey to Scotland. Sometimes my writing is direct and programmatic, eg when I’m worked up about corporate publishers’ predatory practices; other times I’m never sure what I’m going to write and how it’ll turn out – writing as exploration. At conferences etc when liveblogging, I’m completely in the moment, and it’s less about me and much more about live reporting what others think, say, respond to. I’m writing mostly for people interested in legal education, rhetoric, & digital tech; and on the overlaps palimpsests of the arts (literature, history esp), jurisprudence, professional practice (not necessarily indeed rarely legal) – in a word you, dear reader. I’ve noticed you don’t often reply in Comments; yet I bear responsibility for that largely in not being sufficiently welcoming to you in my writing. Or in dialoguing with other bloggers. But I hope that some of it at least has been of use to you over the years.
Drifting through the posts, they seem less coherent and more opportune, grasping the moment, than I’d remembered. Sometimes I surprise myself – did I really think that then? Most times I can discern some kind of linkage to my present ideas and projects. I can’t recall anyone else who has been blogging for longer in the field – if so maybe you can let me know. More objectively, a blog focused on legal education that’s been ongoing for two decades is a record of the field – partial, fragmentary, subjective to be sure; but a public journal of sorts. Re-reading posts I have the impression of a gathering improvement in legal education research and practice over the two decades. So much remains to be done, as I’ve said in this chapter[3]. But it’s undeniably a more interesting and more mature intellectual field in 2025 than it was in 2005.
Given all this, the first piece below, over 20 years old, is oddly representative of how the blog turned out over the next 20 years. It’s representative of zeugmatic thinking. It reports on a seminar, and it puts the seminar in a context (Adam Ferguson – physically, at the Tounis College, on the site of what is now the Old College, as well as intellectually as a key figure in eighteenth century philosophical & educational discourse in Scotland). The historical context critiques the seminar’s intellectual poverty (looking back now, I was too polite on that at the time of writing, still finding my blogging voice to express dissent honestly and civilly[4]). And finally the leap to present day beyond the seminar – Ronald Barnett’s words. Barnett and Ferguson had so much to say to each other on education that was missing from the seminar, particularly their ambitions for their educative projects, the sheer power and breadth of them. The comparison is fascinating. In our legal education discourse we’re too unaware of the rich historical, jurisprudential, cultural, material contexts of our educations – that’s what the adjacencies in the blogpost pointed to.
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Legal Ed Seminar [17 March 2005]
To Edinburgh U.’s Old College last week for a seminar on legal education organised by George Gretton in the Raeburn Room. Late, because I mis-remembered it as the Lorimer room and almost joined a Public International tutorial there. So I missed George’s piece. But the others focused largely on who taught Scots law (especially the difficulty of recruiting Private Law staff) and what they taught (again, largely Private Law, but also concerns about the qualifying core subjects). The concerns are real, and there were valid points made about the situation of Scots Law teaching. But almost nothing about how we taught, or the gap between teaching and learning. And almost no mention of educational research. Still, the seminar got legal academics talking to each other about legal education, which is always helpful, and I’m grateful to George for that. There just aren’t enough occasions for us to do that.
A couple of months ago I was in EUL special collections, reading Adam Ferguson’s Moral Philosophy lecture notes from the 1770s. They are full of interdisciplinary readings, and the breadth of material, as well as the emphasis on a clear ethical structure, is quite remarkable. His portrait hangs in the Raeburn Room, and when I sat down we exchanged nods. What would he have made of the seminar, had he stepped out of the frame and into our midst?
Extracts from draft lectures, vol 1, Dc.1.84:
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- Upon the whole I am happy to have received at so many different periods of our Course some proofs of your application and Proficiency . I hope that you will continue in this manner to exercise your memory [and] your own faculties even when there is no one to expect or to require such exercise as a task.
- Now is your time to begin Practices and lay the Foundation of habits that may be of use to you in every condition & in Every Profession. The great Object of Literary Education is, Sapere & Fari quae sentiat. to [[ [?] the mind with useful knowledge and to quicken the Powers of expression]]
- I have wished to engage you in the Observation [of] Facts relating to Mankind to the History of this Society and the Individual. And to trace those facts up to the General Conclusions that result from them & to acquire from thence either comprehensive views of human Nature or a Proper choice of our Characters, & a right judgement on matters of Public or of private Concern.
- I shall be happy if in these endeavours you found a proper introduction to the study of human Affairs.
Cp Ronald Barnett (1994), The Limits of Competence: Knowledge, Higher Education and Society, SRHE/Open University Press, Buckingham:
Modern society is reaching for other definitions of knowledge. Notions of skill, vocationalism, transferability, competence, outcomes, experiential learning, capability, enterprise, when taken together, are indications that traditional definitions of knowledge are felt to be inadequate for meeting the systems-wide problems faced by contemporary society. Whereas those traditional definitions of knowledge have emphasised language, especially through writing, an open process of communication, and formal and discipline-bound conventions, the new terminology urges higher education to allow the term ‘knowledge’ to embrace knowledge-through-action, particular outcomes of a learning transaction, and transdisciplinary forms of skill.
- [1]And which I first learned about on an Ancient Near Eastern History course I took as an undergraduate in 1977. The city is now famous for the late Roman mosaics recovered from villas there in rescue archaeological digs before the site was flooded at the completion of the Birecik dam complex.↩
- [2]Recently Typepad sent its bloggers notice it was closing down at the end of September 2025. In addition to this blog I had two others, one a private blog on the building of a house on Papa Westray called Moclett, and the other a public blog on Simulated Clients. I’m in the process of trying to save them by moving them to WP.↩
- [3]See here for the book↩
- [4]Unlike the regrettable tone of Gretton’s dismissive review of Beth Mertz’s prize-winning book The Language of Law School↩