“I really saw the Supreme Court as an ivory tower that you couldn’t work in as a young lawyer,” Linda Groegthuisen says on the Supreme Court podcast. After her training, she worked as a criminal lawyer for three and a half years. She currently works – like about a hundred other lawyers, most of them young – in the Scientific Office of the Supreme Court of the Netherlands. In honor of the office’s 45th anniversary, a two-episode podcast has been released: The Supreme Court Podcast, in which interviewer Hezer Cengiz talks to seven World Bank staffers (as they call him) about what it’s like to work there.
The intersection of practice and science
In addition to Gruijthuijsen, Felicia Decker and Michael Sampson also spoke in the first episode. They traded jobs as tax consultants and liability and insurance attorneys, respectively, for the scientific office. All three work in the Attorney General’s Office at the Supreme Court. “What we’re doing is actually being the first to evaluate what we think are in the complaints to the council, within the Attorney General’s Office, so that we can provide draft advice to the Attorney General,” Sampson says. This places them at the intersection between practice and science. “The really nice thing is that you can be guided by the content of the case,” says Groegthwigsen.
Another suite
In the second episode, four other lawyers from the company talk about the nature of working for judges of the Supreme Court, the other wing of the institute. One of the interviewees used to talk about the scientific office over dinner in the evening – his father is a solicitor general – but the vast majority of people do not know about this office. What is it like working with the nation’s highest court for civil, tax and criminal law? How do you gain confidence in your legal abilities? What is the impact of their work on society? Cengiz talks to members of the World Bank about these kinds of questions in the podcast.
You can listen to the podcast via Supreme Court website Or via Spotify.
