'Welcome/Law at Cambridge': Professor Mark Elliott

Well, good morning, let me extend my welcome to all of you as well, it’s great to see you here. My name is Mark Elliott, I am Professor of Public Law here in the faculty, and I’m the Chair of the Faculty, the Head of the Faculty at the moment.

I’m just going to talk for a few minutes this morning just to try to set things in context a little bit, I may end up sort of foreshadowing things that some of my colleagues say later on this morning, but I think there’s always a lot of information on days like this, so maybe some repetition isn’t the worst thing.

I am just going to talk in general terms really about studying law and studying law at Cambridge in particular. I guess you’re all at different points in your thinking about whether law is the right degree for you, thinking about that both in terms of an academic subject and perhaps where you want to be in your career in the five or ten years hence, and you may well be thinking about whether law at Cambridge is right for you and looking at other really great law schools as well. And so, we’ll try to help you with some of those questions this morning. Obviously, they’re big decisions for you, we can’t answer them for you, but we will certainly try to give you the information to make an informed decision as you think about your university applications later this year.

So, what’s distinctive about studying law at Cambridge? Our approach to legal education in one sense is very simple. We are a world leading law school, we’re consistently ranked in the top five law schools internationally and as one of the two top law schools in the UK. And we have a very strong ethos in terms of how we go about our approach to education. We see excellence in teaching and excellence in research as going hand in hand, and our approach to legal education is a research led approach. Let me just unpack a little bit of what that means.

We are a very large faculty, we have around 90 members of academic staff within the faculty and across the colleges in the university. That means that there’s a huge range, a huge diversity of legal subjects which are represented, ranging from very traditional subjects like constitutional law, which I teach, or contract law, through to quite sort of modern subjects that we’re just actually adding to the faculty at the moment, things like law and technology, law and decolonisation, and things of that nature, race, gender and the law.

We have a very wide range of research interests in the faculty, and many of the people who will be teaching you will be the people who are producing the cutting-edge research, who are leading national policy debates in these areas and who are really pushing the boundaries of their subject. That then translates into how we go about teaching our students because for us law and the study of law is not simply about reading a textbook or reading a case, it’s actually about having contact with people who are at the forefront of their fields who are leading these debates and discussions and who can then use that to inform their teaching. So, we think that these two things are not inconsistent, we think they’re actually highly complementary and that the very best teaching at university level can be delivered by people who are very active and very distinguished in legal research.

So, that’s our overall approach to teaching, so what do we teach? We teach all the things that you would expect us to. If you’re doing a standard three-year law degree there are certain subjects that all students would study at any university, and this is partly because you need to cover these subjects in order to qualify professionally. The rules around professional qualification in England and Wales changed a couple of years ago for solicitors, they didn’t change for barristers, and so we continue to teach, and most of our students continue to take, all of the foundation subjects as their course, and that’s criminal law, tort law and constitutional law, which you would study in the first year, contract law and land law in the second year, and then equity or trusts, and European Union law in the third year.

Alongside that we also offer a huge range of optional papers in our second and third years. So, for example, you can do full papers in things like international law, human rights, intellectual property. We also offer half papers to our third-year students so that you can do shorter courses in highly specialised topics. Things like environmental law, comparative law, animal rights law. We also offer to our third-year students the option of swapping out a normal examined subject and replacing it with a dissertation, and you’re supported in writing that dissertation by joining a seminar group that meets during the course of the year with students who are writing dissertations on similar topics, and there’s usually five or six different seminar groups that run each year. Next year we happen to have seminars on things like criminal justice, the family and society, and various others.

As you move through the degree from first year in which there is no choice, you all do the same subjects, through to the second and third years, there’s an increasing range of choice, and that either means, depending on what you want to do, that you can either choose to have a very wide range of subjects that you dip into across the three years, or if you’re particularly interested in certain aspects of law, there’s also the opportunity to focus on particular papers to build up more of a specialisation.

So, that’s what we teach, how do we go about teaching? There are a couple of dimensions to that, one is a practical question about just how do we actually deliver teaching, which I’ll start with. And then there’s a more philosophical question about what are we trying to achieve through our teaching, and what are we trying to make sure that you get out of the programme as law students? Let me talk about the mechanics first, so there are really three components to this I would say, there are lectures, there are supervisions, and then there’s individual study, of which there’s quite a lot if you choose to do a law degree.

Lectures are delivered by the faculty in rooms like this. Students from all of the different colleges would come together for lectures, so you might have around 200 to 250 students in a year group who would come together in a lecture theatre like this for a lecture on one of the papers that they were doing that year. And you would typically have two or three lectures per week in each of the subjects that you were doing that year, and you would typically be doing four or five subjects, that’s sort of the general order of magnitude of the lectures. In the lectures we’re trying to give you a framework that you can then build on for yourself through reading individual study and supervisions, we’re not trying to tell you absolutely everything that there is to know about the topic, but we’re trying to give you the foundations of the topic that you’re doing at the moment in order that you can then go off and build on that through your own study and also through the supervisions.

So, lectures are one component. The second component is supervisions, and in a sense, this is our unique selling point, it’s not quite unique, there are one or two other universities that do this, but very few. So, supervisions are our small group teaching model for our undergraduate students. Supervisions are arranged by colleges, but they’re coordinated by the faculty, so we would try to make sure that you were being supervised in a topic that you were doing in lectures at the same time so that things run in sync with each other. You would have a supervision every couple of weeks in each of the subjects that you were doing, so typically you’d have two or three supervisions per week. A supervision involves two or three students usually coming together with a supervisor who might be a member of the faculty, they might be a PhD student or a postdoctoral researcher, and they lead a discussion for an hour based on what you’ve been doing in the lectures and the reading that you’ve done in preparation for the supervision. This is a highly interactive kind of teaching, so whereas lectures generally involve sitting, listening, making notes, there might be time for a few questions, but essentially, they’re a kind of passive form of learning, supervisions are a highly interactive form of learning. So, students are encouraged to come along to supervisions with lots of questions, they’re encouraged to come along and say, “I read this case”, or “I read this article, but I didn’t quite understand it, can we spend a few minutes going through this?” and the supervisor too will have questions for the students to make sure that they’ve understood the key points and to enable them to sort of take their thinking further and deeper.

Of course all of that can only work with the third pillar of our teaching model, and that is individual study. And this means that law students do spend a lot of time sitting in the library or in their room or in their college, reading cases, reading legislation, looking at academic journal articles, textbooks, and also writing essays and answering problem questions, and you’ll hear more about these sorts of things including problem questions, I think, later on this morning. So there is a lot of personal study, a lot of work that is done that does not involve contact time with members of staff, but all of the contact time that we provide is aiming to help you get the very most out of that individual study to guide you, to help you when you’re finding it difficult, and also to help you to take things to the next level in terms of your understanding.

So, they are the practicalities of how we teach, but why do we teach in this way and what are we trying to really achieve through this? Or to put the question a different way, what would you be getting out of doing a law degree in Cambridge?

The first question is why study law? You don’t have to do a law degree to be a lawyer, at least not in this country. It’s pretty rare actually for that to be the case, in most countries you do need to do a law degree, in the UK you don’t. A lot of people who are lawyers don’t do a law degree. So, why do we offer a law degree and what might you get out of it? Well, the most important thing to say is that we think that studying law is important and interesting in its own right. There are lots of reasons why people come to the university and study things that they may not necessarily use in their career ahead, but actually law is an academic discipline in its own right that is both important and we think really interesting. That’s partly because of course it’s fundamental to the nature of society and how society functions, and that’s very much how we teach law at Cambridge. We’re not training people to be lawyers, although of course a lot of our students do go on to have very successful careers as lawyers. We’re teaching law as an intellectual subject for its own sake even though that might have beneficial professional consequences.

What does that really mean? What it means is that we’re not just teaching law as a dry set of rules to be learned and recited. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of rules and you will have to learn lots of rules, and there’s no getting around that because you can’t get into the more intellectually interesting questions about law, you know, why is the law like this? What problem is it trying to solve? What are the social consequences of having a law like this? What are the economic implications? What’s the historical background? You can’t get into those questions until you’ve got the basics, understood what the rules are, what they mean, how courts interpret them, how they apply them. But that’s simply the starting point, because what we are interested in doing is helping you to think through and to explore the context in which law exists, the historical context, the social, economic, political and other contexts. So you wouldn’t just be rote learning what law actually is, you would be encouraged to think about the law critically and to think about well, is this law really working? Is it solving the problem it was designed to solve? What even is the problem and how might the law be improved on if it isn’t actually working as it ought to be?

A further important part of how we go about teaching the law, and again, this is because we don’t just see the law as a set of rules to be learnt, is that we’re not simply sort of trying to convey information or knowledge to you, we’re not trying to sort of fill your head up with lots of facts about the law and then send you out three years later knowing everything that you will need to know. That would be futile. One of the things about law is it changes, and it often changes quite quickly. Some subjects move very rapidly. That might be because parliament is making lots of new law in that area, think about something like immigration right now, or it might be because the courts are hearing lots of important cases and the Supreme Court is making new precedents and taking the law in new or different directions. So, there’s no way that we can send our students or our graduates out knowing everything they’re going to need to know for the next 30 or 40 years of their careers.

Of course, you need to learn some law while you’re here, but one of the reasons we want you to do this is so that you can also acquire the skills that you will need, either as a lawyer or working in any other profession where you need to think critically, write well, work with evidence and construct persuasive arguments. So, one of the key things we’re trying to teach you as well as what the law is is how to work with the law, to think and write in ways that are appropriate to the subject. And so, while the content of the rules that we teach you about will change, and might be out of date before you’ve even finished your degree, the skills that you acquire through that process of learning, writing, thinking, will be skills that you will take forward into whatever it is that you do next.

Let me finish with two questions, firstly, is law for me? And secondly, is law at Cambridge for me? Is law for me? Well, that’s a question that you sort of have to answer for yourself, and hopefully coming here today and hearing a bit about what we do and how we teach will be useful, and I hope it is. But I think also you need to do a bit more than this, and I’m recommending on this slide a couple of things that if you haven’t come across them already it might be worth taking a look at. The first is a book called What about Law? If you look on Amazon or wherever you’ll easily find it. This is a book that a number of members of the law faculty here have written, and what we do in that book is we take each of those seven foundation subjects that I mentioned at the beginning, and we take a really interesting and important case in those areas and we use that case as a way to try to open up the subject and to explore some of what it means to study constitutional law or contract law or equity, or whatever it might be. I think that reading something like that, there are other good books out there, but reading something like that will give you a sense of the kinds of questions that law students engage with and the kinds of things that we do here because it is written by people from Cambridge, so it will give you a flavour of our approach to these kinds of things.

The second thing that you might want to look at is our relatively new online programme called, ‘Exploring law: Studying Law at University’. If you Google that or if you just go onto the Law Faculty website, you’ll find a link to it. The faculty set this up about a year ago in collaboration with Future Learn, there is a paid-for version of this, but you can do the entire programme free of charge, and if you look on the Law Faculty website you will see how to do this. We run this in blocks during the course of the year, and we’re currently enrolling people for a new block, so if you wanted to join this programme this would be a good time to think about doing it.

So, is law for me? Well, you might have decided it already because you’re here this morning that it is, and that’s great, but if you’re still thinking about that then hopefully those two resources will help you. Another author of this fine book has just joined us and will be talking to you shortly.

So, the final question, so is law at Cambridge for me? Well, again, hopefully being here today and finding out a bit more about us will help you to make that decision. But there’s also another dimension to this which I want to just finish off with because I think it’s really important and I know it’s something that we feel very strongly about. A very long time ago before this building existed, I was in your position. I was thinking, is law at Cambridge for me? I happened to attend a state school that never sent people to Oxbridge, and I was told all kinds of weird things by people that you had to study Latin to do law at Cambridge so I couldn’t apply because I didn’t do Latin, and there were lots of myths about Cambridge. And we are very keen to explode those myths. We are committed to admitting students who are intellectually able, irrespective of social, racial, religious or financial considerations. We particularly want to encourage people from groups who are underrepresented at Cambridge, and we want to make sure that each person who applies is assessed as fairly as you can without any partiality or bias, and at which college you apply to doesn’t make any significant difference to your application.

So, we’re really eager for everybody who feels that they have the interest and the drive and the potential to do well in our degree programme to apply to us. There are no hidden agendas here, and we’re deeply committed to making sure that Cambridge is an accessible and inclusive place for students from any and every background, and I’m sure that you’ll hear more about that during the course of today. Well, that brings me to the end of what I wanted to say, I just want to reiterate that I hope you really enjoy the rest of the time that you have with us, I hope you get as many of your questions answered as you can, and for those of you who are still thinking, do I want to do a law degree, I would recommend the book that I mentioned and also our Exploring Law online programme.