In college, I read a Supreme Court opinion for a philosophy class and realized that it would be really cool to write, whether as judge or lawyer, in an intellectual, detached, and witty (it was a Scalia opinion) way about topics in the real world, where those words had real effects. Nothing since has persuaded me otherwise. Plus, as a lawyer, you get to learn just enough about a million different fields in order to be able to argue about each one intelligently. That possibility - learning up to the level of truly intelligent argument, no more and no less - remains attractive to me, for better or worse.