When I worked in a commercial law firm, I was constantly struck by how neatly packaged my tasks were. I proofread something called a ‘scheme booklet’ within an inch of its life, and spent hours trying to figure out what was or wasn’t permitted in an area of land according to its zoning classification. Work was compartmentalised, discrete, subdivided. I often felt I was losing sight of the larger legal issue as stake as if it was hardly relevant. Although my experience was probably partly due to the fact I was low in the firm’s pecking order, I think this quality of abstraction is true of legal work in general. So many rules, imperatives, obligations—all leading to greater and greater degrees of abstraction.

Often it seemed as though this work was only very tenuously connected to the language of real life. Most people have never have encountered a ‘scheme booklet’. Zoning rules are prescriptive, capricious, as though they are arbitrary, or the product of unseen power dynamics. By marking some emails as ‘evidence’ and dismissing others, we create a narrative that is supposed to reflect ‘real’ life, but does just the opposite.