BRIDGING BARRIERS: CONVERSATIONS ACROSS LEGAL CULTURES  

An Oral History Series by Emails to a Young Lawyer
Curated & Presented by Can Yildirim
Interview No. 11

GUEST BIO

Learn more about the Bridging Barriers series, read my reflections on the previous interviews, and watch their recordings HERE.

This series has often explored what lawyers gain when they cross borders and how their frameworks evolve when faced with novel challenges. Within this frame, my conversation with Dr. Atilla Kasap reiterated how ingrained reflexes—legal instincts and cultural assumptions—continue to shape professionals’ interpretation of the law long after entering a new system.

Introducing Dr. Atilla Kasap

Law became an aspiration for Atilla, offering simultaneously professional structure and flexibility. But as he continued to traverse Turkish legal education, he began to feel that something was missing in the large lecture halls. Limited interaction and a lack of discussion left him yearning for different ways to engage with the law.

That search took him first to the United Kingdom for an LL.M. at Queen Mary University of London and later to the United States for his S.J.D. at Wake Forest University School of Law. Through these experiences, he gradually reconstructed how he thought, argued, researched, and taught.

Learning or Using Law

Throughout our conversation, Atilla drew a clear distinction between learning law and using law to construct arguments.

He described a Turkish system centered heavily on doctrinal coverage and formal structure. He then recounted its British and, especially, American counterparts, in which classrooms demanded participation, interpretation, and independent reasoning. 

Atilla thus echoed experiences that have surfaced repeatedly throughout this series. Like Zeynep’s movement from “knowing the code” to “thinking about why,” and Canberk’s experience of learning to “think out loud,” Atilla’s transition required rewiring habits formed through a traditional civil-law education. His contribution to this broader discussion was his explanation that the common-law challenge required a methodological shift from treating legal writing as the presentation of a subject to treating it as the investigation of a research problem. 

His example clearly illustrated this seemingly semantic difference. Atilla noted that many Turkish scholars would begin with topics: “Securities law” or “Personhood.” In contrast, his  new instinct would locate a question as its starting point: “How should this entity be granted legal personhood?”

Legal Writing as Choice

Atilla’s reflections on legal writing revealed another recurring pattern in this series: writing styles transcend style. They reflect deeper assumptions about authority, persuasion, and the role of the lawyer.

Like Bukem and Gizem before him, Atilla described moving away from ornamented legal expression toward writing built around simplicity and argumentative precision. 

Yet unlike earlier guests, who described this transition as almost entirely liberating, Atilla explained that it offered a choice rather than an improvement. While his early scholarship strongly reflected U.S. legal writing, over time, he intentionally moved closer to European academic styles. American legal scholarship, he noted, often rewards extremely long articles and highly expansive argumentation. European journals, by contrast, increasingly value concision and tighter framing, qualities he found more conducive to his own endeavors.

His subsequent awareness that writing necessarily depends on the audience stayed with me. Cross-border legal scholars do not simply write “well” in an abstract, qualitative sense. They choose how to speak depending on who they are speaking to and what such an audience values. 

In that sense, legal writing becomes a form of translation between speaker intent and listener demand.

Different Ecosystems, Different Behaviors

Atilla also offered one of the clearest comparisons in the series between Turkish, British, and American academic cultures.

In the U.K., he observed a research-centered environment. Institutions and individuals alike were driven heavily by grants, topical innovation, and measurable public impact. 

In the U.S., he witnessed a structured ecosystem comprised of teaching, legal institutions, and professional pathways. Law schools, clinics, firms, and bar preparation systems all interact as parts of a broader system, contributing to and drawing from a shared pool of talent.

In Turkiye, by contrast, he described an individualized academic structure. Professional advancement, he noted, often depends on personal networks and individual branding. Collaborative production and institutional inputs remain tangential to one’s career prospects.

In comparing these various systems, he did not idealize one over another. Instead, he emphasized that as systems shape behavior, they shape the profession. If institutions reward collaboration, interdisciplinary work, and research impact, scholars adapt accordingly. If they reward formal promotion metrics and personal visibility, different habits emerge. Classrooms, courtrooms, and boardrooms thus mold a legal culture that in turn permeates each and every aspect of the law, from codes to expectations.

What I’m Taking with Me

Atilla’s story reminded me that becoming a global lawyer does not require a professional to erase one legal identity and replace it with another. Instead, the individual faces the challenge of learning to navigate between systems without abandoning the intellectual and cultural roots that formed them in the first place.

Throughout this series, many guests have spoken about adaptation, and Atilla’s experience uniquely expands that conversation. In his dictionary, adaptation denotes a selective reconstruction. One learns new methods while remaining conscious of the assumptions carried from older ones, picking the right methods each time a new task presents itself.

Bridging barriers has never been about crossing borders geographically or translating words mechanically. It has increasingly revealed itself to mean learning how to move intellectually between certainty and ambiguity, between systems and cultures, and between the lawyer you were trained to become and the one you are still becoming.