Why i studied law

Do you want to tackle the social or environmental issues in our society? Studying Law can help you fulfil that calling to make a difference. If you feel strongly about issues such as inequality and discrimination, then a law degree will teach you about our human rights, and how to protect them.

Can you get compensation if you are hit by a cricket ball whilst sunbathing in your garden? What is your legal position if you find a worm in your can of tinned peas? Is it theft if you find a diamond ring and decide to keep it? Each of these scenarios may be a bit of fun, but each involves an important legal principle. Studying law is relevant in so many ways to our everyday lives. Law applies in all our daily transactions, from buying your morning coffee to negotiating a pay rise with your employer.

Those land law lectures will suddenly become extremely handy when you come to buy or rent your first property! These skills include an ability to interpret complex information, research skills, forming sound arguments, negotiation skills, the ability to write concisely and accurately, and to communicate with confidence. This qualification will still require you to have knowledge of the law and legal practice, and a degree in Law will help candidates prepare for this new route to becoming a solicitor.

Find out more about this change from the Solicitors Regulation Authority. If I had a pound for every time a friend has asked a legal question For some reason, people think that law students are overflowing fountains of legal knowledge to be tested at will.

This is simply not the case. No, I do not know about the legal intricacies of internet libel law. No I can't help you get out of your mobile phone contract. No, I can't help you if you've killed a man! And even if you do give advice, be sure to add disclaimers. To start with, you will have lectures. Then you will be assigned reading to do, and answers to prepare for tutorials and seminars. I was unlucky enough to have tutors who would use tutorials as interrogation sessions to highlight your deficiencies in knowledge and understanding of the law.

My motivation for those tutorials was avoiding the wrath of the tutor. In hindsight this method of teaching clearly worked. Smaller group teaching sessions are key opportunities to test your understanding and give structure to your learning.

The more effort you put into them, the more you will learn. In your law school, you are always competing against your fellow students for the best grades. Some law schools mark using a bell curve, so that your grades directly depend on how the rest of the year performs.

Some students become extremely defensive and do everything they can purely for personal gain at the expense of others. This is rare, but law school can be a bit like being on "The Apprentice" competing against others in a high pressure environment with backstabbing and drama! To this day, the expense of law textbooks still hurts. At some point during their degrees, when motivation levels are low, and the mountain of cases to read high, law students will question their choice.

A law degree will stretch you to your limits and test your commitment. I know many students who have dropped out of law degrees unable to cope with the intensity. In this special guest blog for Being Human, Conor Gearty, professor of human rights law at the London School of Economics and Fellow of the British Academy, looks back on inspirations drawn from a career studying law.

Definitely not! After a rocky start — I tried to switch from law to politics — I grew to like law as discipline very much. It is quite a pedantic, careful field where rahetoric is not really approved of, and in which accuracy counts for a great deal. Its glory lies in its commitment to logical argument — sometimes that can hide politics of course what is the starting point for your logic? Law is a compelling combination of humanities and social sciences, with a dash of scientific logic thrown in.

My own work in law has been about the way the subject connects with society. As a result I have been especially interested in judges, and the art of judging. At one level judges have to appear to be above the fray of human life; at another they are invariably and inevitably immersed in the conflict, competing interests and ideological wars that make up our complex social reality.

British judges have changed a lot since I started studying law.