Abstract
It has become a rather trite insight to concede that where one sets off in life can have a significant effect on where one ends up. Of course, there are many exceptions to this as people have achieved great success from the humblest of beginnings (and some have managed little success from the most privileged of backgrounds). However, there is still much wisdom and worth in tracing back one’s life’s journey in order to understood how one got from there to here, as it were. But, in doing so, it is also interesting to think about a certain reversal of that traditional sagacity - where we want to go might well have affected where we started. This insight might seem a little counter-intuitive, but it can be illuminating in thinking about the past in terms of the present and about why the journey from one to the other took the course that it did. For academics and especially self-proclaimed theorists, it seems a tantalizing prospect to take a stab at charting the intellectual route that has been travelled or, at least, appears to have been travelled. Accordingly, after several decades in the jurisprudence business, I want to make what some will consider a vain and self-serving attempt at writing my own intellectual biography.