As a lecturer in legal theory, I often hear the complaint from students that reflexive law courses are rather vague (by which students mean abstract). They find it difficult to grasp the theoretical literature. At the same time, many students do acknowledge that in these courses they are ‘allowed to think’ and ‘allowed to have an opinion’. It is up to us as lecturers to show that these courses are relevant and to coach students to deal with the level of abstraction.

To tackle the ‘double problem’ of vagueness and irrelevance, I conducted an experiment, inspired by James Boyd White, in which students were asked to report on a philosophical text by means of a poem, in which they had to project the essence of the text unto contemporary (world) politics. The experiment had a dual goal: I sought to challenge students to read a philosophical text differently with the aim of challenging students to think about the text differently, more critically, and analyse its relevance to contemporary problems in (world) politics and law, to discover their own position – their sovereign voice.

In this publication you can find the poetry exercise and a link to the article.