UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE FACULTY OF LAW OPEN DAY 2012

Transcription

1 UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE FACULTY OF LAW OPEN DAY 2012 Talk: Speaker: Law at Cambridge Mrs Nicky Padfield I m Nicky Padfield and I m going to start with a bit of nitty gritty on the law course in Cambridge. The PowerPoint presentation mentions my colleague, Rosy Thornton, because if I m honest, and I should be honest, she wrote the presentation and I m delivering it. Her skills of PowerPoint far exceed mine. Right, law at Cambridge used to look a bit like that. It doesn t really look like that much anymore, but maybe in some ways it does. Change comes slowly and that s probably no bad thing. Actually, you will know that our building looks like that nowadays, because you re in it and you ve come down underground in it. The picture on the left is the library. You should feel very free to wander upstairs, if you haven t already, and have a look at our rather fabulous library. Of course, one of the amazing advantages of this university is that there are also college libraries and, when you ve made that difficult choice of college and the college has made the excellent choice of accepting you, you will find you have a college library as well as the faculty library to spend time in. There you have students in the faculty, well actually not altogether the faculty, you can see one of those pictures is not Cambridge University Law Faculty; you may have worked out that we share an architect with Stansted Airport. There are similarities between our Law Faculty and Stansted Airport. If and when you visit Stansted Airport, may you think fondly of your time at Cambridge University Law Faculty. We have a Tripos system. I m not entirely sure whether the Tripos does derive from the threelegged stool. Tri as in the Greek three we have a three part degree system. The degree is very usefully divided into three years and in each of those years, in this university, you have to take exams, I m sorry to tell you. If you do law for all three years, you do what s called part 1A of the law Tripos followed by part 1B of the Tripos, followed by part 2 of the law Tripos. So, the Tripos system means it s three parts to the studies. Originally, I believe, and I have no idea if this is true, students might have sat on three-legged stools when they had their oral examinations and that s one of the origins of the Tripos. Nowadays, the Tripos exists I think most usefully in order to allow people to change subjects, so some people will do a part 1 in one subject and a part 2 in a different subject. We don t have combined Honours in the way that many other universities do. You can t do chemistry and law, but you can do part 1 of the natural science Tripos and do a lot of chemistry and then change and do part 1B and part 2 of the law Tripos. So, you could do three years of law or you can choose to do something else first and then two years of law. Two years of law is what we recommend, not just one year of law, because you have to have a qualifying law degree to be recognised for the professional exams for barristers and solicitors. If you come along to do three years of law in this university then you will come along and, in the first year, you do part 1A of the law Tripos. I have to put my glasses on to read my watch, since I see the clock isn t working over there. The clock does normally work, I want you to know. Part 1A of the law Tripos, students do four compulsory subjects and they have no options. Students in the second and third year think that the students in the first year have it a bit light because they only have four papers. Actually, they don t have it light at all, because it s a new place, a 1

2 new institution, and there are plenty of other things to keep you busy as well as the study of law. So, I think it s quite a good balance that there are four papers studied in the first year and then five papers in the second two years. So, in the first year, there is no option for anyone studying law here. Criminal law, constitutional law and tort are all core subjects. For any law degree to be recognised by the professional bodies, you have to study that. I m not sure how many other universities have a compulsory paper in civil law, what we used to call Roman law, and the emphasis is still very much on Roman law. I think it s a wonderful option to make compulsory because it means, in your first year, you study another legal system and then, as you get on to get more detailed in your studies of English law later in the course, you ve got something to compare it against and, actually, we don t get complaints from students about their civil law paper. As far as I understand it from students, and you can ask the students who are going to be giving the presentations and answering questions later on, whether they like their civil law, generally speaking they seem to enjoy civil law and many of them choose to do further papers in it later on. Other universities, generally speaking, rather than that will offer a general paper on the English Legal System. Well, I think we think that our civil law paper, in many ways, is more interesting and you ll learn about the English Legal System as part of the other courses anyhow. So, the structure of the Tripos, if you are a three year law student, looks like that. The papers which are underlined are the compulsory papers, if you want to have what is called a qualifying law degree. If you want to go on to be a solicitor, which involves one more year of exams and a two year training contract, or if you want to go on to be a barrister, which involves a different one year academic stage afterwards, in order to be qualified to do those professional exams you have to have a qualifying law degree and any qualifying law degree has to offer those seven core subjects. So the way we do it, we then make civil law one compulsory in the first year. We also have a compulsory short course in IT skills. Obviously students are increasingly using the Internet for their legal researches, they have to study a research course which familiarises them with the joys of the internet. In the second year, if you want a qualifying law degree, everybody does land law and the law of contract but the options start to come in at that stage and there is a long list of options, which I ll come to in a minute; and in the third year, EU law and equity, equity also known as the law of trusts, a wonderful invention of the English Legal System, compulsory for everybody to study at some stage if they want a qualifying law degree, and then three options. So, four papers in the first year, five in the second and five in the third. These are what the optional papers look like at the moment. They evolve, of course, a little bit over the years, as subjects come and go. We teach law in these compartments, in these different subjects, real life is a bit more complicated than that. The boundaries between subjects, of course, evolves with time and we change our options that are available to students. International law, very popular with students, well I think, actually, I won t select which are the most popular and which are the least popular. I think, again, it changes. There are fashions amongst students, I think, in what they choose. Those who particularly enjoy constitutional law, I think, are quite likely to choose administrative law as an advanced form of constitutional law. I am a criminal lawyer through and through. I spend most of my research time in prisons and I think that every student should want to study criminology, sentencing and the penal system and, indeed, criminal procedure and criminal evidence, but that s my prejudice and students, of course, all develop their own prejudices as time goes on, subjects which they enjoy more. I laugh quite a lot and I tease them at graduation. As Eilis just said, we have just had graduation. One of my students in my college said at graduation, he said do you remember at matriculation dinner? That s dinner right in the first week, you said I bet I ll be able to tease you when you graduate because you said in your application how you were going to be a criminal lawyer and I bet by graduation you will have turned into a commercial lawyer, he said tease me. So I did, 2

3 but I had forgotten, sad to say, it was a common development that the joys or the financial rewards of commercial law win many students. Labour law, employment law, again, popular; intellectual property, which we would a few years ago have called copyright law, again, popular with students; company law, Professor Ferran is a professor in company law, aspects of obligations, duties, an interesting way of looking at advanced study of contract and tort in the private law subjects which will have been looked at compulsorily in the first and second year; comparative law, comparing law with other countries legal systems; and jurisprudence, philosophy of law, not compulsory in this university but relatively popular. Again, it s up to individuals whether they choose to do it. I encourage my students all to do it, because I think it makes them think, but not all of them want to think in that particular direction. The options are genuine options. The compulsory papers are compulsory, if you wish to be considered to become a solicitor or a barrister, but the options are genuine options. As well, in the third year, we have every year a list of half papers. So, you do two half papers instead of one of those options and they, at the moment, involve a wide range of subjects such as medical law, European human rights law, law of taxation. A number of different options will be offered as half papers and also, in the third year, students can apply to write a dissertation instead of an exam for one of their papers. So, that s pretty popular too. You only have to write four exams in your finals. You have a compulsory paper in EU law and equity law. Your two options, which might be one option two half papers plus a dissertation on more or less anything that you want to do it on, as long as it s accepted by those who were supervising the seminar papers which are grouped together under various headings. Certainly, again, I think it s a very nice option to write a dissertation in your final year because it allows you to get your teeth into a subject which has really switched your brain on in the last couple of years and, as an intellectual exercise, I think it s often much better than simply learning for an exam and of course students like it because it s one less exam to do. When your friends are all doing five exams and you ve only got four exams in your finals, it feels rather nice. So, that s the Tripos. Most students who come here to study law do it as a three year Tripos. You can come to Cambridge and do another subject, I think, almost always first. I personally have never come across anyone doing law for two years and then changing to another subject. I think law tends to hook them. If they decided they didn t like law, they probably changed within the first week. The changes to law tend to be changes to law, rather than changes from law, and quite a lot of people will change to law, I think, for all sorts of reasons as their time at Cambridge develops. We re quite nervous of people who are playing the game and think that it might be easier to get in on subject X and then change to law once they re here. So, we tend to be quite fierce with most people and say No, no, you got in to study subject X. You can study subject X for your first year as planned and then change to law for your second two years. A very popular combination is two years of history followed by two years of law, but virtually any other combination of subjects is possible, that s why we have the Tripos system. So, you can t do law and chemistry, as I said earlier, together all the way through, but there s no reason why you shouldn t do them successively. Most of us, who will be talking to you today, are born again law students. We wouldn t be working in a Law Faculty if we didn t like studying and teaching law. So, we will advocate that you want to study three years of law, because you get the more interesting options by doing three years. If you only do it for two years, you will have to cram in all the compulsory papers but, of course, there may be strong arguments for doing other subjects. If you love biology more than any other subject, there s quite a strong argument, I think, for getting a first class degree in biology then changing to law and you can make yourself a fortune as an intellectual 3

4 property lawyer who speaks the language of science rather better than I ever would, for example. So don t rule out combinations if that s what you want to do. We have a fantastic system, Erasmus exchange system. I don t understand why all students don t want to do it, really. I would, if I had my time again, undoubtedly turn my three year law degree into a four year law degree by having a year in either and these are our current exchange destinations: Poitiers, Regensburg, Utrecht and Madrid and I can see no reason for not doing it. You become proficient in the language where you go to study, though the zero linguists go to Utrecht where they can study in English and, again, my limited experience and prejudiced view is all the students who ve come back after their year abroad have done better in their finals than I would have guessed before they went on their year abroad, because they ve come back that little bit older and wiser. So, I very strongly encourage you to think about that. Some of you will be thinking about your linguistic skills and I would certainly, hugely, encourage you to keep up whatever linguistic skills you have because we as a nation are deeply embarrassing in our incompetence at languages. So, if you happen to be competent, keep up your language skills. I don t think I would suggest that you go to a university where you can do law in French because actually you ll spend less time doing law and more time in the classroom doing French and probably you ll learn as much French by doing it this way and spending a year in Poitiers studying French law with French students than actually having a combined Honours Degree. I would also like to stress that our holidays are immensely long and their time is to be made use of and I know many students who ve had holiday jobs in the vacation in overseas countries practicing their language skills. In fact, I will remain indebted forevermore to the student who worked in Euro Disney one year when my children were all the appropriate age, who got more free tickets than she knew what to do with, and the Padfield family had a very nice holiday in Euro Disney. Thank you very much to that particular student. So working in France in your four months, as you have just spent off in the summer, is of course quite as useful as doing a combined Honours. So think about what your skills are, what your interests are, whether your interest in language is really language rather than literature, and plan your courses according to what you really think you want to study. Don t be too led by what other people tell you that you ought to study because my view is that you will study much better what you want to study rather than that which your teachers tell you that you are very, very good at. If you re very, very good at something and you re bored by it, you ll probably stop being very, very good at it quite soon and you re better off studying something which you actually think is interesting. Lectures happen here. You re in quite a large lecture theatre here, so the compulsory subjects will have lectures in this lecture room. If you wander along, you ll see lecture rooms slowly shrinking in size as you go along there and lectures, generally speaking, happen in the mornings, certainly for the compulsory subjects and the first year subjects in the mornings, and then the small group teaching, what many other universities would call tutorials and we call supervisions, happen at other times of day, normally therefore, either in the afternoon or maybe in the mornings when you don t have any lectures. For most subjects there will be two lectures a week in the first year. As you get settled in the first term, three lectures, as we go slowly, to begin with, explaining English legal method, how to read cases and so on but, generally speaking, there will be two lectures a week per subject, four subjects in the first year, five in the second and third year, and then you have a supervision, a tutorial, once a fortnight in that subject, and they look a bit like well, that looks a bit scruffy for a lawyer, doesn t it, that room? I think that s an English supervision. I know it actually, because it s a friend of mine giving the supervision. But they do happen in small rooms, small groups, two or three students generally, three or four, perhaps in law, when you ll be given a reading list. One week you go away and read it for a fortnight, come back in a fortnight s time and you ll sit around and discuss the 4

5 problems that you ve been asked to discuss. You ll probably, every other one, have had to write an essay. We do work our students very hard. You should anticipate that, if you come to Cambridge to read law, you have to work hard. I think we try to select those people who convince us they actually want to work quite hard. It s quite fun working hard and you probably have to write, probably, eight essays a term. You go to other universities; you may well find that it s significantly fewer essays you have to write every term. Actually, you won t be surprised that I think it s quite good for you to write eight essays a term and it doesn t really sound like a very hard workload, does it? And it makes you engage your brain with the subject much more because you had to write something. As well as what you had to write, though of course, you also have to think. You have to discuss issues, and so on, when you re preparing for your supervisions. That s a law book. That s a series of law books, and that s the end of the formal presentation. That s on the course. What we didn t put on that slide was anything about the colleges. We re here, this is the Faculty s open day, and we want to entice you to the University of Cambridge to study law, and we re not particularly saying anything about colleges. I think it s a really difficult question for you to decide which college to apply to because it doesn t really matter in many ways. All the colleges offer law as a subject and one of the wonderful things about teaching here is you don t have to teach that which you re not competent to teach. So, nobody would ever ask me to teach company or commercial law and, therefore, how do the students of Fitzwilliam College ever learn any company or commercial law? Well, of course, we have swapping arrangements with each other and I teach criminal law to a number of colleges and the students of, let s say, Downing College, complain because they might have to walk up to Fitzwilliam College for a criminology supervision, all of a mile, and my students walk down to Downing College for the civil law supervisions, or whatever. We do swapping arrangements and it all works perfectly sensibly in terms of the supervisions. You will be taught in your college some of the time and you will be taught in other colleges some of the time. Colleges are much more than halls of residence, they develop a life of their own in all sorts of ways. You don t have to choose a college. You can put in an open application and it also happens, for many people in the admissions round, that when you ve chosen a first round college, a first choice college, it may be you re unlucky and you don t quite get in and you get put into what s called a pool and you may get selected by another college and invited back for another round of interviews later on. So, the admission system is done through the colleges. While you re here it s certainly worth your while wandering around and looking at colleges, exploring a little bit, but even though the way into the university is through the college, this law Tripos that I ve been talking about is very much the creature of the university. The university offers the lectures, the university examines you and the university gives you the degree at the end of the day. So, it s a complicated relationship between university and college, but really, they are all part of one whole and I encourage you to wander round and have a look at the place. I think I ve got time for, perhaps, one or two questions before I hand onto my colleagues, who I can see hanging around outside. Does anyone want to ask a question about admissions? Yes? 5