The Law within is Above All

I’m Elaine Quinn, a woman and mother on a committed journey to both uproot and release deeply-held outdated beliefs and structures, and to weave back in their place systems and structures born from the natural and life-sustaining wisdom of the feminine.

I hold a first-class honours degree in International Commerce and French from University College Dublin, and am qualified to practice law in three jurisdictions (Republic of Ireland, England and Wales, and California (US)). I am also a certified mediator.

In 2004, in a seemingly random encounter, a chiropodist told me I should be a lawyer and I enrolled in the Law Society of Ireland’s programme that day. A few years later, I won first prize (Findlater Scholarship) in the overall professional practice exams in a class of 500+ students. Law has always felt like a vocation.

The peak of my traditional legal career was my time at Kennedys Law in Sydney working side-by-side with Australia’s top defamation lawyers on multiple cases involving high-wealth, high-profile individuals and companies defending their reputations and good names, learning the practice and art of reputation law from the best in the trade. It was a time that coincided with an extended period of personal spiritual awakening. The combination of deep states of meditation and dealing daily with high-pressure workloads, intense confrontation and crisis situations gave me access to a rare zenith state (I have since come to understand as a deep natural feminine tower power state that has been both forgotten and forbidden). It also ignited a knowing that the roots of our collective legal and governance structures and frameworks are dysfunctional, a deep desire to travel to those roots to understand why, and to be involved in the process to alchemise and rebirth them.

Between 2016-2020, while working as a senior lawyer with the Insurance and Wealth management department of a major London law firm, I founded and edited an online magazine to promote consciousness-raising ideas and practices within the legal profession. The last edition was co-edited with the late Peter Gabel, a brilliant American law academic and president of New College of California School of Law. You can read some testimonials for the magazine here.

Since my son was born in 2019, I have been drawn more radically onto the path of feminine remembrance and spirituality. The revelations on this path about the true meaning and role of Law and Justice continue to unfold within a central theme of the inevitable rebirth of Lady Justice. I write about my insights in my Substack, Queen’s Counsel.

The R in my name stands for Rheda, my mother’s name. I like to think it also stands for Rowan, my son.

I was born in County Sligo, a mythical and mystical county in Ireland and feel a strong, loving, ancestral calling from the land there.

I have lived for extended periods in global capitals – Dublin, New York, Paris, Sydney, London – and am currently based near Utrecht in the Netherlands. I am a dedicated student of energetic leylines and astrocartography and recognise the profound impact location can have on our wellbeing.

I have four fantastic siblings. My sister Lorna is a super-talented Irish actress.

I am a student of the feminine arts and am reviving within myself sacred devotional practices to the feminine.

“The Conscious Lawyer is an inspiring effort by publishing excellent articles and interviews illuminating the spiritual dimension of true justice and describing efforts all over the world to bring that dimension into the way we conceive of the just legal resolution of human problems. The Conscious Lawyer is at once profound and fun, making use of mutli-media forms and lenses to help a new generation of lawyers re-imagine the very nature of their work and the link between that work and healing social activism.”

PETER GABEL, LAW PROFESSOR, WRITER, FORMER COLLEGE PRESIDENT, AND COMMUNITY ACTIVIST

Issue 1 / Issue 2 / Issue 3 / Issue 4 / Issue 5

I founded The Conscious Lawyer in 2016 coming up with the idea during a period of research at Keele University in the UK, when I was excitedly looking into the possibility of integrating mindfulness into legal education. At the same time, my work was as a senior Practice Development Lawyer at a large London law firm where I was responsible for producing a lengthy client bulletin/magazine on insurance law. Impacted deeply by the disillusioning state of affairs in legal education (as described in several of the books and articles I was reading), I set about using the skills I was learning as an editor to create a new magazine in law that would offer a different and more hopeful perspective – especially for law students and young lawyers.

It covered innovative and emerging practices of law such as Collaborative Law, Conscious Contracts, Contemplative/Mindful Law, Community Law, Cooperative Law, Earth Law/Nature’s Rights, Holistic Law, Integrative Law, New Economy Law, Restorative Justice, Sharing Law, Sustainable Justice and Therapeutic Jurisprudence. There were five issues published between 2017-2020 with plenty of online articles in between. Read on Medium here.

Subscribe to Queen’s Counsel Substack