even court attire, which i used to hate because it was so like having to wear a uniform, is beginning to become comfortable you put it on, and you go to work.

it is not about you, people are not sizing you up for how you’re dressed; we’re all dressed the same, we all have to be

dressed the same.

as a uniform it is a powerful symbol. security guards are more deferential, take less time screening you, people don’t ask questions when you let yourself into restricted areas, when you pass through the

corridors or enter a courtroom you nod and smile at others, they know

if all my wayward insistence on brightly-coloured, figure-hugging, mad-men dresses for the office is my way of refusing the tedium and conformity of corporate wear, my courtroom attire , the very inconspicuousness, deliberae — personality

it is not about you, to walk through the courthouse in

the security guards are more polite, you can let yourself into restricted areas

a transparent hummingbird ~

apart from the sayerses, which do both,

the books i reread compulsively, my comfort books, are entirely different from the ones that have

and some of the books that were life changing for me i’ve read only once. then my life changed. so i didn’t read them anymore.

I started college planning to be an Anthropology and Philosophy double major but within one semester I was back to English literature, and willy-nilly, Med-Ren at that. At that time my reading was still primarily Anglophone. (Well obviously Sinophone too, but we’re talking only about American colleges.)
There were more requirements , so I thought

Second year came around: I was toying with the idea of being a Medievalist. To be a Medievalist you needed the Latin, so I went and got myself a Classics department course catalogue. To get a Latin minor you needed six semesters of Latin, one year of Elementary Greek, one semester each of Roman and Greek Civilisational History, and one course in Roman or Greek literature. I had just barely enough time to fit that in with my English major. On the first day the

The professor came in and he was holding Ransmayr. I could not resist the subtitle: “with an Ovidian Repertory?” I went and bought a copy. The same summer I discovered Roberto Calasso. WHAM I discovered Roberto Calasso. WHAM. intellectual punch to the solar plexus. And at the same time I was reading Christoph Ransmayr’s The Last World with an Ovidian Repertory and Cees Nooteboom’s The Following Story + In the Dutch Mountains

(I got through quite a lot of Plato and Xenophon but after one semester of Herodotus I decided that was quite enough Greek and I would read him in English) ( I had to sit through quite a lot of the De Bello Gallico before I could get to the Virgil, and I don’t mind telling you ancient warfare bores me to tears.)
.

children’s literature, myth and fairy tales, riddles,

i am not against trademark, copyright and patents AT ALL. but i think it has to be balanced against the public interest matters: freedom of expression in parodies and in artistic works and other creative riffs on a trademark. freedom of access and information in relation to intellectual products.

if you’ve produced art work, why shuld someone else be able to use your material, without attribution and in a commercial enterprise? if you’ve written a bestseller, why shouldn’t you be entitled to be paid for the book and to object to pirated copies? it is a human right that you own intellectual output is protected, that you have property over your own creations.

if you are a drug company and drug tests are astronomically expnesive, why can’t you patent your medicines — you have an economic right to recoup your investments or who would do research?

we will be able to provide long term assistance by following through with the same litigant and attend hearings with them, take notes for them during the hearings, explain what is going on. if they qualify for full legal assistance, we will accompany them to legal clinics to seek advice and also record and explain the advice to them. and when the matter goes to trial, we will help them organise their case and ensure they have filed

we will attend hearings with the litigants, the problem is not legal but economic. why should developing countries pay so much how can developing countires have the same access –

for patented medication of freedom of speech and information

Dorothy Sayers - Gaudy Night + Busman’s Honeymoon (still for several of us (Tsinyen, Vaughn)

Cees Nooteboom’s The Following Story + In the Dutch Mountains: They made me attempt to change my major (too late) and to switch my field to primarily European than Anglophone Christoph Ransmayr - Ovidian Repertory and AS Byatt’s Possession - it spoke to me at a time Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch (apparently at MIT they make them read this in political theory to teach them about revolution) and Thud — all of my pratchetts are comfort books rather

Malory Towers series. When i was in primary school all my early stories were somehow ripoffs and fanfics of english boarding school stories

there was a small group of young academics up at nus, americans, people who were in their late 20s early 30s, junior faculty, all working in the humanities at the time that i met them, these people were about in singapore 3-4 years — enough to start to know singapore

and at the time, one of these academics was a korean lady,she was an anthropologsit by training, works with refugees, her husabnd, who is american, they both taught at nus, political science department,

because of the korean connection, i became friends with the wife, the korean lady, and through her i got to know and i started hanging out these epople but one by one people left and eventually there was just john left actually there is a couple who are still here, for a few years, the four of us woudl go out, but then they had a baby we just stopped seeing them they were just very involved and protective about the baby one reason was that it was a difficult pregnancy, they tried for a long time, treatments and so on, and the wife was quite old, she was in her forties, so not as easy a preganncy and of course, both of them are teaching, they don’t have a helper, they have to take care of the baby so they just cut their social life completely — it was impossible to ask them out so then it just became john and me

john is — he does’t use a smart phone he doesn’t even check his smses much, call him he hardly ever picks up so if you want to do something with john you have to arrange it beforehand, you have to know exactly when and where we’re meeting — ebfore you leave the house so i don’t like to make arrangments with him unless i’m sure i can make it

so now i just go by muysefl if von is back von wil go with me and if not there’s a new friend — this american lady, who’s a art historian and she just moved to singapore last year becos her husband go ta job and we got to meet through the alumni assoicaiton here, we’d gone to virginia for college so nowadays i tend to ask her if she wants to go to things i enjoy going with her — and listening to the types of questions she asks people for me, i’m not an artist, i react to a lot of wroks the way i react to text analyse it but as text , semiotics or i have an emotional response but she will ask questios about process and medium and and i learn alot both from the questions she asks and the answers she get

miss that i haven’t been part of that world for a long time now but it’s the world i came from, specificallyt he american humanities academia i understand their presures and issues i und erstand that kind of life cycle and school cycle nd i know enough about –maybe i don’t keep up with the newest research (haven’t for years) but if you explain resarch i u nderstand what you ’re doing and i

vv qujet ppl j — he’s v reserved, v guarded with new people he has to know you v v well when you do he’s v v funny he has this v dry, sarcastic humour and fnny becos of the way he uses language v words colourful and precise way quotes - we speak in quotations - litty ppl tend to do that his bf is even more shy so a lot of times, when the three of us are out i feel like i have to carry the conversational load a lot and that i need to be very loud and very excitable just to keep the atmosphere

the other is with v v noisy, over the top people john, i have a friend who is a theatre director in london high energy, talks v fast, v exuberant people, overtop, a bi campy, so i kind of tune up to match them — part of it is that the im balance is too stark if they’re that noisy and i’m even more reserved than normal then it encourages you to be reckless and out of character and noisy and

strong bond — korean community didnt know uch abt them before i went to work for them was v unimpressed before i went — contemporary pop culture - contemp roean art - dance forms and — films — old black and white korean films - poetry modernism and contemporary art –

people v interesting — history — mixutre of regret and hatred and sorrow — they have this inferiority complex about japan image issue everyone recognised japan is superior , korea is less civilised historically korean considered themselves more civilised than japan chinese civil passed to korea and thru korea to japan more developed ongoig political issues japanese colonisation — jpanese rule was v brutal japan — comfort women issue, but also many oreans were taken to japan to work in mines during japanese colonisation a lot of them returned to korea — nam uneasy 1890s since 91905 protecotrate then annexation

you only come to litigation when there is no amicable way to resolve a situation, when you are charged with a crime, when you cannot reach a s utilities would be split, naturally. for one party to pay the other rent would leave them uncomfortable — they’re a couple and that is the equivalent of their cohabiting/matrimonial home but if he pays no rent, what would he be doing? he would be living in someone else’s house on bare licence, like a guest. but what security does he have? if they breakup or quarrel badly, he couldbe on the streets the same night. family does not protect him.

but supposes he contibutes something however little to the mortgage. in property law that changes the nature of his interest in the property. in classic property law, if you contribute to the purchase price, and there is no agreement to decide how to assign the interest i the property, then you breakup === how are yougoing to divide the property –he acquires an interest in the porperty if they break up, does it mean julian has to pay john compensation or does john get a percentage of the house you would have to go to court to prove that there was no intention for thim to retain

if you break up –

litigation whent here is no aicable wiay to resolve a sistuaotion charged with a crime something is wrong and you an’t settle ti situation is v bad and people are in a v bad emotional state and v irrational or they’re stressed and sacred

time sensitive - stirct proceudral rules about - arcane and strict - waht can you do and what not posted to you ona friday you get it on mondy, 3 days gone by then you freak out or you get angry for rage afor 2 days and you tell everyone — what shourl di ido — by then another - then finally oyu start looking for a lawyer, make appointment to see someone, by the time you see someone, nearly one week is gone, they still have to take time to study your case to see if you have a case or not, if you’re property lawyer, your work is all transactional witha bit of avisory shipping lawyer criminla lawyer - no transacitonal work, litigation litigtion firm — forget about going home before 1am

cheapens the professions insulting to those who are genuinely suffering

stress, you go thorugh some bad periods, you make bad judgment calls, sure and yes, they are extentuating don’t call that a mental illness –

rich go and get an expesnive excuse cheapens the p

who wake up everyay and live one day at a time send an email every 3 or 4 days

classes in which

myth that even our departments

hate the straitlaced — tab

overmedicalisation of every eprsonal issue but i love normal it is: one day i caught myself in the corridor listening to people discuss dosage and finding myself chiming in and then

incredibly smart people who are all also incredibly neurotic not all of whom are always socially well adapted all of whom are obssessive but also insecure about their work and all miserable because everyone is miserable in grad school and under great stress, because grad school is stressful and there’s no money and the job market is bleak and you put them all into one department and also the same dormitories where the insecurity and fear and stress contagion - passing back and forth you have ot provide mental health faciilites

is this happening to me?! am i ook lets see what’s avai i remember when i first moved back to singapore i thought well it would be nice to have a therapist here just as we all did back int he us imh? it’s just down the road from where i live, right? i even have a bus from my door step! i went and took a look at the waiitng room: weekday - when do working people have time tog o but their case load is already overwhelming what are whingey people like me who can afford to go private doing there taking up the space i went once and i had a good look at the waiting room and then i came home and talked to my in law who at the time was a consultant one of the things i loved about

battery saps dramatically if I leave any background apps on.

But I am clinging stubbornly and sentimentally to it. I like that it appeared at a time when smartphones were just becoming ubiquitous and there were so many varieties and designs, whereas now everyone has got a thin white slice. it does all the things i want a smartphone to do when i need it to — and the rest of the time it is, well, just a phone.That is my one bit of real stubbornness.

but the crux is also that sexual attacks and abuses are heinous because of their non-consensual nature and the degradation to the victim (and as a woman i find sexual crime especially troubling) but i dont know that the existence of the type of behaviour should really enter into it unless there is a causal link drawn.

the psychiatrist’s role is to diagnose and to testify to the existence or non-existence of a disorder or disease of mind/brain (which i hold to be something entirely within their sphere of expertise), and if so to tell us whether that disease have a causal impact on the actions of the accused, so that the court can decide on issues related to causation and voluntariness. and yes, we bow to expert opinion on prognosis and proposed treatment for probation reports. but by what right or training is a psychiatrist to say in a medical report whether they thought someone must have premeditated a crime — that is a question of evidence, of legal inference, especially not if you’ve only seen someone for two sessions and purport to be able to tell their life story.

but i also don’t believe medical personnel with the powers to prescribe mandatory treatment (and if they have any detention powers) should recommend that a person be kept “at the president’s pleasure.” i bet IMH has secured wards for criminal offenders who mighthave been there for 10 years or something.

criminal work is not often (although it sometimes is) about issues of law, it is actually quite fact-based — in that when you go to trial, i

analysing, interpreting and reconstruct evidence, a little more like police work in that sense, is most like police work — investigation

just looked around and there are 28 men in this room and i’m the only woman

and crim work is fairly routine when it comes to issues of law — it is much more about factual analysis, dealing with the evidence and interpreting or challenging it, building up a picture of what the case theory is. and because unlike in civil trials (affidavit-based) it is

but much more about evidence and how you analyse, interpret and challenge evience, about building up a pciture of what is, case theory

who is good at i’m bound to get all my accordeur de participes wrong

i’m only fluent in engish and chinese, i read latin and classical chinese, i used to read classical greek and anglo saxon, i can get by a litle iwth korean and german, when i travel in japan and korea i use chinese characters to glean meaning, in korea my accent is good enough to pass for kroean.

you

playful with language, you like ju

naturally –

assonances

you admit to enjoying kitschy commercials

i write about riddles, their relationship to poetry and metaphor. i’d never say what else is poetry but the convergence of sound and sense, but

http://www.stashtea.com/cart#back (

part of that, for me, has to do with my personal temperament and outlook.

as i continue to look for a criminal training position, i wonder if i’m wrongheaded to persist: afterall, it may well be that i’m temperamentally unsuited to crim litigation: there’s the emotional and philosophical difficulties i have with the nature of crime itself, my constant doubts about human beings and free will, and also, sometimes, the criminal justice system.

and crim trials are more intense than civil trials, because it is — on the feet thinking, it is about evidence, analysis, much less about legal argumetns and technical sophistry but about evidence analysis and narraative building.

courtroom skills, reaction time,

has to do with thinking about outcomes, and crafting and structuring documents in a way to achieve that, that is and still making it elegant,

, because of the mental energy needed to

crim litigation is about skill — thinking on your feet, cross examination skills, witness handling, and all the time keeping your case theory in view and analysing new information rapidly and we do of coruse, but most of the time, facts rather than law

questions of law do

civil litigation s about strategy, submissions, pingpong, amend — endless tream of dratng and skillful tennis with the opposing lawyers

i don’t generally like civil work, whether or not it is litigation or advisory

sometimes i feel very unsure whether i’m better suited to crim work or civil work.

turn on esoteric facts:

the nature of a crim trial in singapore is very different from civil trials, because in civil trials we use affidavits for the EIC but in criminal trials we have even for the EIC we need witnesses to give testimony in person.

means being on your toes all the day, it means drafting nonstop , and it means a great deal of client care.

But it is

Just as I no longer feel like arguing
when some critic starts — there are things I’m not unh , but it is too why does the singapore govt do this, why is and I am too tired of explaining too many times.

We were having dinner and you asked me what I thought of bugging Angela Merkel. And I didn’t feel like arguing. I shrugged. And you were not amused. I remmeber you said That is a major fail. But that was not a fail to me. Right, wrong, absurd, that is America. In time you come — not to judge it any less — nor even to mind less — but to

it’s not so simple, and I don’t

Just like I never feel like arguing (unless I really have to) when some critic or other starts hectoring me about authoritarianism in Singapore or human rights. It is not that I am unaware or unashamed of , but it is also not

Youlive here, ou kno,

you can see all the flaws and problems, allt he t , there are things that make you despair, but you’ve — you don’t think waht a shitty country. Actually, Singapore is a very cool country. It does so many things rights. Of course it screws up alot of things too. (It deosnt’ mean we dont’ see it or judge — and

I will try and leave 2 minutes to respond to Maddie and then just do 2 minutes on

Americans see constitutionalism as synonymous with liberal constitutionalism (the adjective would be superfluous to them) and constitutional law as being about the security of individual rights and freedoms against the state. (Americans never say “constitutional” without the next word being “rights” do they?) But to think that constitutionalism pivots on liberal values is surely misguided.
It’s not that I don’t myself prefer the autonomist, expressive values I identify myself as liberal, my world is — but I appreciate Singaporean-style communitarianism and ‘green light’ administrative law approach.

–

can we not prioritise — American liberalism — And, why should it not be possible for us to prioritise education, economic development, social stability, and community welfare, healthcare, sensible taxation policy, public services,

It is difficult sometimes, when you step aside - to say — why are you lecturing us on liberalism, when we run our country in a better

– that is a way of reading cons that impoverises its meanings.

if they were synonymous, then nonconstitutionalist illberalism, but in fact — non liberal constittuionalims — effect limtis on comunity norms and instituions derive from communities how we frame our publci life

constitutionalism pvitos on liberal values. this is nonesen –
cosmopolital, autonomist, expresive but progressvisit

NL Constittuionalism L Constittuional L non-constitutionalism NL NC

Wherever people value some aspect of communal –

we should be able to — and I think to a great extent Singapore has — crafted these values into a constitutionalist structure — so that they have public status but do not infringe overly into

And it would be folish to divide up aainst — we have liberal and illiberal (or should i say non-liberal) elements I do not go as far as to say that the liberal state is a form of covert coercion — but how we create a framework for states to operate — – philosophical basis that any government needs to be constrained

and to use community and cultural values to constraint the state, rather than liberal ideals to constrained the

collectivist dangers — and, Singapore has had that tendency, up till the 90s. But To Americans, constitutionalism means liberal constitutionalism, which leaves no room other forms of constitutions– theocratic constitutions, for instance, (but not theocracies) - or more communitarian constitutions like Singapore’s. It’s misguided — we are not a tyranny, we are not even, come to that, authoritarian, as characterised by Western media, because that suggests we do not abide by the rule of law. We do, but we are more instrumentalist about law. We govern on the basis of rule BY law, if you will, if not entirely rule OF law.

Because really, Westerners (perhaps I only mean Americans) make such a fuss about voting and elections, but I don’t see that they have much trust in who they do elect. And really, what is the point of electing people to do things if you end up having to scrutinise what they do yourself?! I only have American politicians to compare them to, but on the whole I find Singaporean politicians satisfactory — yes, some (many) of them hold values and views that are very different from mine, some of them say stupid things that make you wonder about their EQ, but you understand that they are earnestly doing what they believe they should, by their own lights, and I have no sense that any of them are self-serving or self-glorifying. (This is completely what I’d enver think in America.)

This morning the lecturer spoke in passing about the Government White Paper on Shared Values — and skimming it I note the reiteration that those who govern should be ??, ??

To me that is a lot more

When people talk about Singapore and neo-Confucianism the detractors tend to reduce the argument to “what’s so good about a benevolent dictatorship”? But it seems to me that

it is not so much the alleged communitarianism (i think Westerners tend to read communitarian as synonymous with collectivist), it is not even that we

because it is absurd to say singapore does not abide by the rule of law — we are patently the –