Why You Should Care About Whistleblowers Going to Jail
Our government is shooting the messenger
News & Reviews Magazine
This article is part of our November edition. Read the editor’s letter to see what other fantastic writing has just been published. If you’re annoyed that it’s paywalled, then that means you wanted to read it, which means you value it. These writers get paid for what they do because their work is valuable. If you like that this type of independent media exists, please back it!
The piece you’re reading now is by Kieran Pender. Kieran is a senior lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre, where he works to protect Australia’s whistleblowers. He is also an award-winning writer, for The Guardian and The Saturday Paper, and an honorary lecturer at the ANU College of Law.
Kieran previously wrote this great piece for News & Reviews Magazine:
As a lawyer and a writer the hardest part of my job is explaining legal issues for public audiences. The law is complicated—there’s a reason we spend five years at law school—but its importance needs to resonate beyond the cloistered confines of those who did a law degree. Directly and indirectly, law shapes almost every aspect of our society. At its best, the law can alleviate inequality and address injustice; at its worst, it compounds these things, often with devastating results. We all have a stake in our legal system, which is why we all need to understand it.
The legal profession is not known for seeking to make the law accessible and understandable to the world at large; indeed often it feels like the opposite is true. There is a whole specialisation of people who help communicate scientific developments to the general public. You can major in science communication at university and there’s even a National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science. The law has no such equivalents.
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