On David Lessels,
David Lessels
11th February 1949 - 28th December 2018.
Often it is only looking back that you realise how much someone has influenced your life. Often it is only by looking back at a life that you can see that the influence they had was the natural outcome of their character. So it is for me and David Lessels.
It turns out that one of the defining aspects of my life was that I went to Aberdeen University Law School, in the early 1990's with half a dozen of my Aberdeen Grammar school friends and that a few of us won scholorships which enabled us to stay in halls despite being a native of Aberdeen. From that experience I cemented or gained lifelong friendships, a toolkit for understanding the world, a first class training for what turned out to be a decent brain, a love of law, jurisprudence, philosophy, constitutional politics and Roman History and a career which has provided me and my family with prosperity and security and four years of the social whorl which comes of being the pivot and connector for a whole community. I was reminded at David Lessels' funeral yesterday that the reason we had ended up at AULS was, as it was for many, many, many others, was David Lessels.
Professor Lessels was for 40 years a lecturer in law at Aberdeen University. He taught Legal Systems to first years. Literally Law 101, he taught the foundation course in law to 100 law students a year. For 40 years. For decades he ran the law school's admissions process, its pastoral programme, its international exchange programme. He taught because he loved to teach. The joy he felt that you, you yourself, were thriving, interested and doing so at his law school fair shone out of him. If ever I have met anyone who could deliver a little touch of Harry in the night, it was David Lessels.
He came to speak to our year at the Grammar and, by his presence and example, persuaded many of us to join him at Aberdeen University Law School. If David Lessels taught at AULS then AULS was the place for us to be, and so, so many of us did.
David Lessels had a gift for teaching. Man, he was blessed with the pure power of pedagogy. An ability to explain the compexity of the law by combining a clear yet memorable turn of phrase with a delivery and intonation that could make the location of the Court of Session both hilarous and of the greatest moment which has never been equalled. Often imitated, by me amongst others but never equalled. "The Court of Session is found in Edinburgh from where it never moves. It. Never. Moves." If on, on your first day of law school you can grasp that fact, then the complexity of the interconnections between Scots civil and criminal law, their histories and their relationships with Roman, EU and English Common Law will just flow in to your brain and lodge there, first as knowledge and then as wisdom and lastly as culture and it never moves. It. Never. Moves.
Professor Lessels also had a gift for caring, for being interested. Not in taking an interest but in actually being interested, in you. He remebered you. He rarely asked how you were, he asked you about something he knew you were doing? How was your preparation for your moot next week going? Were you getting on okay with the paper work your intership? Was that goal you scored in your last hockey match really offside? You knew that he cared and you wanted to be your better self if only to be worthy of the respect he showed you. Two of the finest complements I have ever been paid I had from David Lessels, that I had a fine mind and, more importantly, that he had heard that my impersonation of him was very, very good. He cared for whole classes, whole generations, of students and through that care he radiated a great optimism that you could and would do and be your best. He dedicated his life to helping that happen for the faculty and students of Aberdeen University Law School.
University is both an education and the experience of becoming yourself. For 40 years David Lessels educated the lawyers of Scotland and helped them to grow in to themselves. Over 40 years he will have done so, personally and directly, for thousands of students, perhaps one in every five Scotland's lawyers. That in turn will shape the culture of our country for generations to come.
A fine legacy for a fine man but I rather think he would be made prouder and happier by how well his son delivered his eulogy and how warmly and lovingly he was remembered.
https://www.abdn.ac.uk/law/news/12597/
https://www.abdn.ac.uk/law/news/12597/