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Hello, my name is Richard Williams and I'm a lecturer in corporate law here at the University
of Cambridge. I'm going to talk to you today a bit more about the nuts and bolts of studying
law so some of the facts that Eilis mentioned are going to come your way, a lot of them
are going to come your way in my presentation.
Now, before I start, I should just acknowledge some of my colleagues because this presentation
is very much an evolution of the presentations that predecessors in this role have given,
so I should acknowledge contributions of Rosy Thornton, Amy Goymour and Nicky Padfield.
The first thing I wanted to flag up for you today is our new website. We've just launched
a brand new website dedicated to admissions for the BA undergraduate degree and the address
for the website is on the top there. A lot of the things I talk to you about today, there's
a lot more detail about these in the website so, please, I would urge you to have a look
at the website and browse through. It does have a lot of information, as I say, talking
a lot about more some of the things that I'm going to discuss today.
So, Law at Cambridge: what is it like? Well, that's a bit like what it used to be like
many, many years go but it's not like that really anymore and we certainly don't look
like that, I think most of us don't anyway, and I think our students are a lot more enthused
and a lot happier than that guy who is on the bottom right there who looks like he's
entirely given up on whatever's going on there. But what are we like now? Well, really, you
need to just look around you, okay? This is one of our main lecture theatres so this is
where students come for their lectures; students from all across the colleges of the university
come here to have their law lectures and also in this building upstairs is the Squire Law
Library which is the photograph there, on the right-hand side, and you should feel free,
actually, to have a wander upstairs, in fact I would encourage you to do so during the
day. The Squire is a fantastic place to work. It's a fantastically well-resourced library
and it really is one of the very best things about studying law at Cambridge.
What about the course? What's the course that we have here in law like? Well, we've got
a Tripos system and what's the significance of a stool, you might be asking? Legend has
it that the name of the Tripos comes from, or was derived from, the three-legged stool
that students apparently used to sit on many, many years ago to do their oral examinations
in the university. I have absolutely no idea whether that is true or not but that is certainly
one of the Cambridge legends, partly about where the name Tripos comes from, tri of course
being Greek for three. But what is true is that our law degree has three parts, so it
fits the name Tripos, and there's one part of the Law Tripos for each year that you study
and each part, as I say, therefore it's neatly divided into the first year, the second year
and the third year.
To give you a kind of overview of the structure of the law course here, in the first year
of studying law which we call Part IA of the Tripos, you take four subjects and that's
followed by exams and then in Part IB, which is the second year, again you take five subjects
followed by exams and then the pattern is repeated in the third year which is known
as Part II of the Tripos where you get five subjects and again exams. So you can see that
you do exams every year when you're here but it's a nice, I think, structure because you
study a topic for a year, do the exams and then you move on and you study other topics,
so I think it's a nice, neat structure to the way that we do things here.
One point I should mention, actually, which I'm often asked about is the fact that our
law degree leads to a BA, not a LLB. Now, there's absolutely no significance whatsoever
in the difference between the title of the degree, BA and LLB. All the degrees in Cambridge
are all BAs, whether it's a science degree, a maths degree, a law degree, an English degree,
a history degree: they're all BAs. So, there's no significance at all between the fact that
ours is a BA and other universities offer an LLB. Our law degree is what's called a
qualifying law degree. It's for practice and I'll talk a little bit more about that later.
Looking at that in a little bit more detail for the sorts of things that you would study
as part of the Law Tripos, in the first year students follow four compulsory subjects so
there's no choice for our students in the first year. They have to take papers in Criminal
Law, Tort Law, Constitutional Law and Civil -- we call it Civil Law but it's also known
as Roman Law -- and I guess Roman Law, the fact that that's a compulsory paper, is one
of the unique things, probably, or at least one of the special things about studying law
at Cambridge. I don't think that there are that many universities left where Roman law
is a compulsory paper but it certainly is here and I think that's a very good thing
and it's a really important part of your first year of studying law here because right from
the start of studying law here you're looking at a system of law that's quite different
from our own English and Welsh legal system and the study of Roman law introduces you
to all sorts of concepts that you'll be looking at throughout your law degree and is obviously
therefore very useful in helping you to understand and evaluate similar concepts in English law
because, of course, you can always refer back to Roman law and you can look at, as I say,
how it's been done in a slightly different way and it really helps your understanding
and it's actually a very popular paper. Students really enjoy it. So that's Part IA, that's
the first year. As I say, there are four compulsory papers.
In Part IB and Part II, as I said on the previous slides, students take five papers in each
of those years. Now, the way it tends to work, typically in Cambridge, students will take
as part of their five papers Land Law and the Law of Contract in Part IB in the second
year and then Equity and EU Law in Part II in the third year. Why is that? Well, it's
related to the professional requirements for what's called a qualifying law degree. So,
in order to get what's called a qualifying law degree which allows you to take the short
route to legal practice, either as a solicitor or a barrister, you need to have studied and
passed an examination in the seven core law subjects and the seven core law subjects for
the professional bodies are criminal law, tort law, constitutional law, land law, law
of contract, equity and EU. So, virtually all students will study those seven core subjects.
They're not officially compulsory, at least in the second and the third year, but I think
it's very, very rare that somebody wouldn't take them and get the qualifying Law Degree.
So, two of the options in Part II are taken up by Land Law and Law of Contract, sorry,
in Part IB in the second year, and then you get your three options and then, as I say,
third year Equity and the EU and then another three options.
Now, in the third year we slightly broaden out the choice for students by introducing
the choice of writing a dissertation for one paper so, instead of taking a paper which
leads to an exam you can write a dissertation and be assessed on that dissertation in place
of a paper that leads to an exam, and you've also got the option of taking what's called
half papers which are papers with a slightly shorter syllabus, papers with a shorter syllabus,
but you have to do two of them. So, instead of doing one what's called full paper, so
a paper with a full weight syllabus, you can substitute two half papers instead. But one
of the things we pride ourselves on in our law degree here is the degree of choice that
we give our students. As you can see there, you get six choices throughout your degree,
six optional papers that you can take and I think that's a real advantage of the Cambridge
law degree, this degree of choice which you don't always get in other law degrees and
it really gives students a chance to look into particular areas of the law that they're
interested in or just to look across a broad sweep of different areas of law to get as
broad an understanding of the subject as possible.
So, in terms of the optional papers that are available, these are some of the papers that
we've got available at the moment and, as you can see, it's not the complete list but
these are some of the papers that we've got and, as you can see, it affords students a
broad choice really to either, if they want, to look into what I've just said, you know,
particular areas of law so if, for example, you were interested in criminal law, you might
take papers in Criminology, Sentencing and the Penal System; you might take a paper in
Criminal Procedure and Evidence. If you're interested in constitutional law, you might
take an option in Administrative Law. Basically we can accommodate all sorts of interests
that students might have.
Looking, I guess, down the list perhaps a little bit more, International Law that I've
got there up the top is quite a popular paper. We've got a very good research centre here,
the international law, so a lot of students like to take International Law. Civil Law
II allows you to look in more depth at Roman law and is also another popular paper and
if students are very interested in Roman law from Civil Law I they can look at Civil Law
II. Administrative Law I've already mentioned and we've got Family Law. If you're interested
in the history and the development of law you can do Legal History and them moving down
the list I guess we've got the commercial papers like Commercial Law, Labour Law -- which
is employment law - Intellectual Property Law and, of course, I shouldn't really pass
over Company Law which is my favourite, the one I lecture, which students take and hopefully
like so, yes, you can specialise in commercial options if you want to.
In terms of the seminar papers and the half papers that I mentioned to you a little while
ago, they fall in Part II of the Law Tripos so if you want to write a dissertation you
can only do it in Part II which is in the third year. Now, there are various different
dissertation options and I probably should say, actually, that all of the options slightly
change from year to year. We've always got a good choice of options so there is always
a lot of choice for students but the precise configuration of the papers does vary from
time to time. I've given some examples of some of the seminar papers that have recently
been running so you can look at law and economics if you like, you could write a dissertation
on family law or you could write a dissertation on a topic that falls within the general theme
of woman and the law; these are some of the papers that we've got and it's something that
I think it's a really valuable option, and we don't make the dissertation compulsory,
so we don't make the students write a dissertation if they don't want to, but equally if students
have found a particular area of law really enthuses them and they're really interested
in it in the first two years of study, we try as far as we can to accommodate that in
allowing them to write a dissertation in the third year and it's a really valuable thing
to do because it really gives you a chance to think about an area of law in real depth,
think about the policies that are underneath the law, think about the choices the law represents
and whether we should have different choices or whether we think we can, you know, found
a different law to achieve the stated objective in a better way and, as I say, I think it's
a really valuable option to allow students to really think about an area of law that's
interested them; and then, of course, the half papers as well.
Again, the half papers are limited to the third year, so to Part II. You can only take
half papers in the third year. All of the optional papers in the second year, in Part
IB, have to be full papers which are the ones on the left-hand side there, and again, I've
given you an indication of just some, not all, but just some of the half papers that
are on offer at the moment so you can look at Banking Law, which is obviously very topical;
Medical Law, which is also, again, very popular; and European Human Rights Law which is also
a very popular paper to look at.
So, that's the core, if you like, of the Law Tripos. That's the core structure of studying
here but it's also possible to spend a year abroad here because we participate in the
Erasmus scheme. So, as part of your degree, if you want to, it is possible to apply to
go abroad for a year and study at a law school on the continent as part of the EU-wide Erasmus
scheme. Now, we have links with four universities at the moment so you can go to France and
go to Poitiers; you can go to Germany and go to Regensburg; if you want to go to Spain
you go to Madrid; and then it's also possible to go to the Netherlands and study at the
University of Utrecht. Now, the way it works in Cambridge is that you would apply to go
on the Erasmus scheme at the beginning of your second year and then if you did go away
you would go away for the year in between your second year and your third year. So the
three-year degree would become a four-year degree because you would go away in between
the second and the third year.
One thing I probably should say, just to flag up, certainly about the first three there
in terms of France, Germany and Spain, if you are interested in an Erasmus year abroad
in one of those countries, there is obviously a language requirement if you wish to go abroad
and study in a law school there. You don't need to be fluent, so we don't require you
to be fluent in French, German or Spanish but you do need a good grasp of the language
in order to be able to get off to a good start if you want to study law there but, of course,
one of the key advantages of the scheme is that you will really develop you language
skills while you're there so we don't expect you to be word perfect but there is some requirement
that you have a reasonable degree of competence. So, I guess what I'm saying is that if you
are interested in an Erasmus scheme and you have got a language, it is well worth keeping
it up for the first few years while you're in Cambridge so that it can be up to speed
if you wish to participate in the scheme.
There's no language requirement though for the Netherlands which very kindly teaches
in English so you can go to the Netherlands without any foreign language requirement and
you can be taught in English as, indeed, actually, one of my students is going to Utrecht next
year, and I think the Erasmus scheme is a really, really excellent scheme and I guess
is one of the regrets I've got about when I studied law, that I didn't actually apply
for an Erasmus scheme and I kind of wish I had as I think it's an absolutely fantastic
opportunity to go abroad, live abroad for a year and also to familiarise yourself with
a different legal system, a different way of doing things and I think, something anecdotally,
but invariably when students come back from having been abroad for a year, they tend to
perform more strongly in their exams here. Maybe it's just because they're a year older
and a year wiser, I don't know, but also I think the fact that they've been exposed to
a totally different way of doing things really helps them to understand and analyse English
law and do it very well. So, that's one slight variation on the normal scheme of the Tripos.
The other thing I wanted to talk to you about today is the possibility of converting to
law as well. One thing Cambridge does not do is joint honours degrees so you can't do
a joint honours degree of, say, Law and French or Law and Spanish or Law and Politics in
Cambridge. The university system does not have joint honours degrees. But what you can
do is you can change to law from a different subject and that's a kind of advantage of
our Tripos system because it does allow students to mix different parts of the Tripos. So,
it is possible to study one subject for one or two years and do your Part I in one subject
and then convert into another subject for Part II. Now, the number of years you have
to do in a first subject if you want to convert to law depends so if you're interested in
this route you really need to research it because the different regulations for different
Tripos's sometimes require you to do one year before you can convert, sometimes you have
to do two years, but it's certainly a possible option and what happens, as I say, if people
do wish to convert is, broadly speaking they follow this pattern: they would come to Cambridge
and they would do one or two years in their first subject and then they would convert
into law and we usually recommend that if people are going to convert to law, they do
two years of law, so they convert and they go into what would be the normal second year
but it would be their first year, so they go into Part IB of the Law Tripos and then
they study Part IB with five subjects, exams and then they go on and do a second year of
law and study Part II of the Law Tripos with, again, five subjects and exams.
Why do we recommend that people can do two years of law? Well, the qualifying law degree
as I mentioned a little bit earlier: you need to do those seven subjects to get a qualifying
law degree and take the short route to go and be a practising solicitor or a barrister.
There are seven of them so you can't do them all in one year so you have to spread them
across two years which is why we recommend that if you're going to do law, you might
as well do two years and get a qualifying law degree and that is what, I think, virtually
everybody who converts does.
I should say just a couple of things about converting, though. First of all, it's a college
decision as to whether a student can convert from one Tripos to another so it's not a university
decision, it's a college decision, so if you are interested in pursuing this route I would
certainly consult the college that you're thinking of applying to before you apply and
see what their arrangements are for converting from one subject to another because sometimes
colleges will have particular requirements; they require you to perform to a particular
standard in your first Tripos before they will allow you to convert to a second Tripos
but it's a college decision so, as I say, I should probably just leave it at saying,
if you are interested in doing this, it's something that's well worth asking college
admissions tutors about before you apply and, of course, the other disadvantage of converting
to law, I guess, is that you get much less choice because of the ten subjects that you
would do in law, seven of them will be core subjects and you only get your three optional
papers. I guess I'm slightly biased because, as somebody who's spent their entire life
studying, certainly from the age of 18 anyway, studying and teaching law, I absolutely love
law and I think it's a fantastically interesting subject so the more of it, the better so I
guess my preference would be, if you're interested in law, do the three years, do the normal
law course but, you know, without wanting to put you off, if this is something that
you're interested in then a lot of people do it and they do it very successfully but
I think it's something that requires perhaps a little bit more research, particularly on
the college side, before you apply. So, that's the structure of the Law Tripos.
In terms of teaching, which is the next thing I want to talk to you about very briefly before
I open up for questions, there are three principal methods of learning here in Cambridge. There
are obviously lectures, there are supervisions and the third one, very important, lots and
lots and lots of independent study. Now, the lectures are delivered here and that's a very
nice picture of the lecture theatre that we're sitting in at the moment. As I think I said
at the start, all of the students from all of the colleges studying law come here, centrally,
for lectures, so all of the students from all of the colleges get the same lectures.
This is our biggest lecture theatre and they get slightly smaller as you go along the corridor
and typically the core subject lectures, so contract, tort, constitutional, criminal law,
etcetera, etcetera, will be taught in here because that's where we have the biggest groups.
So everybody comes here for their lectures.
Lectures are usually delivered in the morning - I'll show you a sample timetable in a minute
- but usually delivered in the morning, not always but usually in the morning. We like
to get our students up, nice and bright and early, particularly when they're in the first
year. So, lectures in the morning and then the afternoons, typically, will be time for
supervisions, which is the other key component of Cambridge teaching.
Now, supervisions are called tutorials in other places. They're called supervisions
in Cambridge. I don't really know why; it's one of the many quirky things about Cambridge
you get used to. The fact that the week starts on a Thursday has always slightly perplexed
me but there we are; the week starts on a Thursday. They're called supervisions and
not tutorials but supervisions, anyway, are small group teaching. It's one of the real
advantages of coming and studying law here. Typically for law supervision, you'd be in
a supervision group of probably three, sometimes two, exceptionally four, but I guess three
is about the usual number of students in a particular supervision. Now, supervisions
are arranged by colleges so when you come to Cambridge, you would obviously be part
of a college and each college appoints what is called a director of studies to look after
groups of law students in a particular year and it's the college director of studies who
is responsible for organising a student's supervisions in the papers that they are taking,
so the colleges will organise the supervisions. Sometimes you'll be supervised in your own
college. If there's a specialist in the particular area of law that you're studying in your own
college, then the likelihood is that you would be supervised by that person in your college
but no college has got enough law fellows to cover every single paper that we offer
so a lot of supervisions will not be delivered in your own college but will be delivered
in another college because your director of studies would make an arrangement with somebody
else to supervise you in a particular paper in that college so, if I were to give an example,
in my college, in Christ's, Rosy Thornton at Emmanuel will supervise my students for
Equity and in return I supervise Rosy's Emmanuel students for Tort, which is one of the areas
I teach, so we tend to work on this swop basis.
So, as I say, supervisions usually happen in colleges and actually we've got a little
picture of a supervision there. I'm reliably informed that that is actually an English
supervision but it doesn't really matter. It's the same general setup. In law, supervisions
work on a fortnightly basis so you would expect four supervisions for each paper that you
take per term and that's ten in total because we have three eight-week terms but the last
half of the final term is for exams, so there are ten supervisions per paper in total and
because they work on a fortnightly basis you would get four supervisions in each paper
each term. If you can organise things well, particularly in the first year, what happens
is that you can get a two-two split so in the first week you might have a Roman Law
and a Constitutional Law supervision and then in the following week you'd have Criminal
Law and Tort and then the pattern repeats throughout the term. So, as I say, four supervisions
per subject per term. Supervision times are usually negotiated or agreed between the students
in a particular supervision group and the supervisor and, I should say, the supervisor
will obviously be an expert in the particular field of law that you're studying.
The way supervisions work: each supervisor will send students a reading list for that
particular supervision and a set of questions to discuss. So, the supervisor will give you
a reading list, usually two weeks before or sometimes you'll be given more time, but at
least two weeks before the supervision you're given a reading list and a set of questions
to discuss and the idea is that you go away, you do the reading, you think about the topics
under discussion, you sketch out your arguments, you might discuss it with other students and
then you come to the supervision prepared to discuss the subject with your supervisor,
and I guess that's where my third point comes in.
There's lots and lots of independent study on top of this so behind the lectures, behind
the supervisions, there's a lot of work for students to be doing on their own, going through
their reading lists, working out their discussions, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Supervisions, I think, they are really important and a really valuable part of the Cambridge
system because being in a group of three gives you a really valuable opportunity to discuss
a particular area of law with an expert in that field and also to discuss it with your
fellow students because there are only three of you in the group so you can get really
some quite detailed and in-depth discussions going on and some really interesting ideas
being aired in the supervision, much more so than you would get if you were in a larger
group of, say, ten or twelve students where you might get the chance to contribute once
or twice but inevitably your participation is going to be a bit more limited. Not so
in the supervision system which really comprises students contributing as much as they possibly
can to the discussion in that particular supervision group.
One thing I should say, though, is of course there is a lot of work to do so I think you
will have gathered from what I have just said, we do expect our students to do a lot of work
and I guess you should be under no illusions about that. Studying law at Cambridge is hard
work but the benefits, I think, really are obvious because, you know, our students, I
think, really enjoy the subject so much more when they're able to look into it in that
much more detail and discuss it with people who have a real interest in the field and
obviously it shows at the end when students tend to do very well and go on into very good
careers, but it's not all about studying.
As I say, there's a lot of hard work but it's not all about hard work and I should probably
mention that there are a huge number of other activities going on in the university and
that students can get involved in so a lot of students will play a sport and be involved
in a sport, other students will play a musical instrument. Frankly, whatever you're interested
in, there's probably some society in the university that you can join and you can explore that
alongside your studies and a lot of our students do that so I shouldn't make out that it's
all about all work and no play; there's a lot of work but there are a lot of opportunities
for doing other things as well and in terms of law-related activities -- sorry, that's
the timetable that I said I would show you actually, if I just track back a little bit.
This is the typical timetable, I guess, that a first year student could expect. Usually
you get around ten to twelve contact hours of lectures per week and then, as I said,
if you can have your supervision balance you will have two supervisions on top of that
as well so that's a, sort of, sample week's timetable.
The other thing that I was going to just mention, as I say, lots of sporting activities, lots
of other things going on if you're interested in doing that on top of your studies but also
mooting as a kind of law-related activity; one thing that you would not be short of studying
law in Cambridge is opportunities for mooting. Now, mooting is, kind of, discussing legal
problems. It's a, sort of, competitive way of discussing legal problems in a court setting
with different sides making different arguments about a particular legal problem and you have
a judge who will eventually judge the moot. It's a very popular law-related activity and
we've got a rather splendid room upstairs called the Moot Court Room which is dedicated
to that sort of activity which you can see a few pictures of there and there's a lot
of mooting that goes on, both at the faculty level and indeed the college level if you
want to get involved in that as well.
The final thing I wanted to talk about is just a word on colleges. Now, I'm sure you're
all aware that admission to the University of Cambridge is through the colleges so if
you want to study at the university you have to apply to a college. Most people tend to
choose a college on their application form. You don't actually have to do that because
you can tick a box which is an open application. If you really don't know what college you
want to choose and you want to apply to, you can tick the box which says "open application"
but then your application would be allocated to a particular college which would consider
your application by a very complicated algorithm which tries to match up and spread applications
evenly across colleges, but either way admission is through a college so colleges do play a
central role so I would certainly say that the important part of applying to Cambridge
is to look into colleges and a lot of colleges will have open days and if you can go to a
college open day, I would certainly urge you to go and do that.
In terms of the choice of college - I guess we're talking here about studying law and
I want you obviously all to apply for law because I think it's a really interesting
subject with fantastic opportunities for after you've studied it -- in terms of the choice
of college, in a sense it's kind of up to you but I would perhaps just reiterate my
message from a few seconds ago. I think the key thing is research when you're choosing
a college. I often get asked, actually, which college should I choose and I kind of say,
well, it's kind of up to you. There are 31 colleges of which I think 29 have people for
law. Three of the 29 are mature only, so they only take applications from people over the
age of 21, so if you're 18 and applying, you've got the choice of 26 colleges and there are
all sorts of different colleges: there are older ones; there are modern ones. I really
think the key thing is research and just see which one you think you feel most comfortable
with.
But I would emphasise, I guess, a few things which is that everyone attends the same lectures
so whichever college you go to, everyone attends the same lectures and the supervisions are
actually very much spread across the colleges anyway because of what I mentioned earlier,
so whatever college you're in, you're likely to be supervised by academics in all sorts
of other colleges as well and, to be honest, I think from experience whichever college
students go to, I think invariably they love their college and they also say at the end
of the year, I'm so glad I came to this college because that's where your friends are, that's
where your community is and I think people have a really strong sense of loyalty and
identification with their college.
So, that's my talk. I've got a few minutes for questions if we've got any before I hand
over to my colleagues who are going to talk...