Learning law "by ear"
This lawyer's name is Terry Lee. Born nearly completely blind, he overcame the barrier posed by written texts and earned a law degree, becoming Taiwan's first sightless attorney.
Lee, now 30, was born prematurely, and his eyes were incompletely developed, leaving him virtually totally blind. But his parents did not for this reason shelter him from the world, but treated him as a normal child, punishing him duly when he did wrong. He didn't much like studying when he was young, and his grades were always at the bottom of the class, but he could do arts, music, and all kinds of sports. Despite never having seen a depiction of a dinosaur, he figured out how to shape them in clay just by running his hands over models of the creatures. "The one that stands on four legs, has a long head and neck, a round body, and a long tail is called a brontosaurus; the one with short front legs, claws, and sharp teeth is a raptor."
His grandmother, who doted on him and was always there for him, hoped that Lee would one day become a teacher. In his second year of junior high school, he decided to shoot for better grades in hopes of impressing a girl in his school who he had a crush on. Little did he expect that well before he got to the point of telling her his feelings, he would start getting top grades, and once he got a taste of being first in his class, it was onward and upward from there.
As he proceeded along his path toward becoming a special-education teacher, his father recommended to him that he study law, and test out his possibilities in life.
"My reaction was, 'No way!' I thought about how dry, boring, and complicated legal texts are, and about how much time I would have to devote to nothing but rote memorization. I wanted to party at university just like everybody else does, or at least I didn't want to suffer for four years." But his father insisted, though even after Lee tested into the Department of Law at National Taipei University, he still felt resistant to the idea of going there, and he and his father went through several months of a mutual "cold war."
Fortunately, after getting to law school he found out that law wasn't as tedious as he had feared. Sure, plenty of memorization was needed (and even sighted people had problems with that!), but it was also necessary to grasp the logic of each legal provision and use deduction to extrapolate from cases, skills without which the memorization would have been meaningless.
Unlike his classmates, Lee could learn only through listening, which required bringing a recorder to each class to make each lecture into "audio text." If the professor failed to provide enough detail in the lecture, Lee would have to do research (using computer tools and resources for the blind) on his own to fill in the gaps, which was not easy at first, but over the course of four years he smoothly mastered learning the law "by ear."
(1) Terry Lee's first job after graduation, landed thanks to a government program to find more employment for the visually challenged, was making telephone calls on behalf of the Bureau of Labor Insurance to get people to pay their back bills. This picture was taken at work with the dog of a colleague. (2) This picture was taken when Terry was small, and his mother took him and his three-year-old younger brother to Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, where they rode around on a tricycle. (3) From eighth through 12th grade, Lee was the first trombone in the band at the Taipei School for the Visually Impaired. (4) Though sightless, Terry Lee has been far from friendless. The photo was taken at a pottery class he attended in Nantou County during his junior year in university.