Louise Gullifer
1. When you were at Brighton & Hove High School, and what is your fondest memory of school?
1970 to 1979 (including 2 years in the Junior School). I have very many fond memories, but particularly of musical activities e.g. singing the eponymous role in Amahl and the Night Visitors.
2. Who was your favourite teacher and why?
I think Mrs Hancock, one of our history teachers, who insisted on a high degree of independent thought in our A level work.
3. What were the benefits of being in an all-girls school?
I never gave it much thought at the time, but in retrospect I think it enabled us to obtain a high level of academic confidence in any subject we chose.
4. What did you want to be when you ‘grew-up’?
I wanted to be a barrister from my early teens after watching a TV series called ‘Justice’ about a glamorous female criminal barrister. My years at the commercial bar were not quite like hers!!
5. What do you do now, and what are the most rewarding and challenging parts of your job?
I am the Rouse Ball Professor of English Law at the University of Cambridge (the first woman to hold this chair) and,currently, Chair of the Cambridge Law Faculty (the second woman in this role). My underlying post involves teaching students at all levels and researching and writing in my specialist area, commercial and financial law. The most rewarding part is being able to help students achieve a high level of understanding of the law and an ability to develop and defend their own views. One significant challenge is trying in my writing to make sense of the law, to work out what the legal rules are, and should be, trying to achieve and to explain all this in a way that is comprehensible to a reader. In my role as Chair both rewards and challenges come from the part I play in HR issues: encouraging and advising colleagues in their career but also dealing with problems and obstacles that arise.
6. What are you most proud of so far?
In my career: the success of my students and more junior colleagues whom I have mentored, the part I have played in shaping and drafting various international legal instruments, and setting up a Commercial Law Centre in the college in Oxford in which I was Law Tutor for 20 years, and which is still going 7 years after I have left.
7. What was the best piece of advice you were given whilst at Brighton?
Not to talk so fast. I still have great difficulty in following this advice.
8. What advice would you give to your 18 year old self?
As above: not to talk so fast… But, more seriously,
(a) to have confidence in your work and your opinions, but not to be afraid of changing your mind when confronted with a better argument and…
(b) not to have too fixed an idea of a career path, but also not to stop working entirely at any point, so that you can enter the job market again at the level at which you left it.
9. What book, film or piece of music would you recommend to your younger self and to your fellow alumnae?
My whole life has been imbued with making and listening to classical music. It is very difficult and invidious to pick out one work, but one that has I have sung at particularly interesting times of my life is Brahms Requiem. I first sang it in the choir at BHHS (in English), then recorded it and sang it at the Proms with the BBC Symphony Chorus and quite recently sang it with an choir of international amateur singers while I was living in Rome. It is a hugely inspiring and optimistic piece of music, despite being a requiem, and is very rewarding both to sing and to listen to.
10. How would you like to be remembered?
I think I would most like to be remembered as an academic legal scholar who enabled things to happen by bringing together others, working with and leading teams, and, hopefully, providing some inspiration.
