I love to read. Many people find this unsurprising, after all I’m in law school and they say you shouldn’t attend law school unless you really love to read. When I was nine, however, I didn’t love to read. My family moved across the country and somewhere between sunny California and sweltering Georgia I dropped my literacy off in a cornfield. My teachers called it an academic regression. I had not taken to reading easily the first time, I can recall nights sitting with flimsy picture books as parents took the time to walk through the pages with me word by word, syllable by syllable. So, to learn it all again, and still love to read, is to say that I love the act of it. I learned to love it slowly, savoring every step and gaining an appreciation that I cannot take for granted. One night my mother said, “Annolee you didn’t read that, you’ve memorized it.” She was right, I had memorized the phrases by ear. In her own way she was asking me to slow down and sit with the words on the page. If reading was not about being able to recite or perform… then for me it became intertwined with sitting, thinking and wondering.
As I grew older, I kept a dictionary by my bed,
a fact my brothers made fun of me 
for. I would read through and highlight words; fascinating words, beautiful words, complicated words. Each entry came linked with various meanings, roots, and antonyms which all aided me in my quest to understand every word around me. I have always had a slow and methodical relationship with words; one built on curiosity and time spent wondering. To my surprise the first year of law school seemed to be marked by definitions and wonder.
Wonder can often feel far removed from the legal profession; the word ‘lawyer‘ conjures up ideas of suits, courts, and wordsmithing without leaving room for ideas of curiosity. Yet the legal profession is insatiably curious. We define everything. We define what a tort is (a civil wrong), then we define types of torts (battery, assault, conversion, etc.), then we break that definition into elements to be proven in a court of law (intent, causation, damages.), then we define those elements. Repeating the process in an ever-tightening spiral. This is all done in the pursuit of understanding through wonder.
I am now a 3L at The University of Tulsa College of Law, meaning that I am in my final year of law school. After all this time I’ve come to this conclusion: a lot of law school is defining words followed by defining every word in that definition, followed by proving to others how you’ve determined what a definition even is. It’s all curiosity, it’s all wonder.
We devise all sorts of tests, hypotheticals, and methods of comparison. A key concept to legal analysis is stare decisis in which courts follow decisions made previously within their jurisdictions. A decision made previously establishes a precedent, in which a certain case acts as an example for future similar legal issues. This is to say a court by its very nature looks backwards, tries to understand, and attempts to apply analysis and thought in a similar way to the present case.
As a child, books became a point of solace for me. While I may have felt I was falling behind, my slow and quiet dedication to them was a reprieve from academic expectation. Words on a page, after all, expected nothing of me. Yet they still challenged me and invited me in. To be curious about words I did not know, concepts I could not rectify, even styles of writing and genres that I hadn’t yet explored. All of it was wonder, curiosity without expectation. That is why I was drawn to the legal field, there is no way to jump to the end of an argument every person walks slowly and methodically through each analysis, each step, each piece of legislature, case law, and history that has brought us to the point where we are now. Even laws themselves are written in anticipation of future events; they cannot help but look towards the horizon and wonder.
The foundation of law is not just a history, but one of curiosity. To compare current facts, issues, rules, to similar facts issues and rules. To weigh public policy and precedent, to understand not only the meaning of those before you but the impact that our actions may have on those after us. We do not need to crash open the door of the legal field to curiosity, so much as we need to remember that the foundations of the law have always been to wonder. To sit with words curiously without expectation, attempting to make sense of a past we did not write, while planning for a future we cannot see.