Nicholas J McBride - Letters to a Law Student: A Guide to Studying Law at University

This book has been written for anyone who is doing, or thinking about doing, a law degree at university. The book comprises a series of letters to a law student, Alex. The first letter is sent to Alex while Alex is doing A-Levels and thinking about doing a law degree at university. The final letter finds Alex just about to graduate from university, having done a law degree. The thirty letters in between track Alexs progress from school to university, giving advice to Alex on various issues such as how to study law, how to write legal essays, and how to revise for exams.

Alex does not exist, and no one who is thinking about studying law or actually studying law will share all of the concerns that prompt the letters to Alex set out in this book. Some letters will be of more relevance to you than others. If you are considering studying law at university then you should read chapters as required.

One of the themes of this book is that to remember information, it is not enough to read it; you have to use it as well. Anyone who reads letters in the early stages of your legal studies, to ensure that you are putting the lessons of those letters into practice. If you do this, youll soon find that youll never have to read those letters again to remember what they say; the habits of study and writing that they seek to inculcate will have become completely natural to you.

Because Alex doesnt exist, it was necessary to give Alex an identity to make certain assumptions about Alex. Ive assumed that Alex is doing a normal three-year law degree. So Alex is not doing a mixed law degree, such as a degree in Law & Politics or Law & Criminology; and Alex is not doing a degree that involves going somewhere on the Continent for one or two years to find out what the law says over there. Ive also assumed that Alex is studying law at an English or Welsh university, and not a university in Northern Ireland or Scotland.

The third edition of this book was written against the background of an admissions round at Cambridge where a number of colleges including mine that had plenty of applicants for law found themselves unable to fill the number of places they had to offer those applicants. The problem, it seems to me, is that we live in a society that does very little to help students leave school with the sort of skills that would make them naturally suited to studying law at university. It seems to me that there are nowadays fewer and fewer students who leave school equipped with the abilities to argue properly, to think rigorously, and express themselves persuasively precisely the sort of skills that law students need to have in order to perform well as law students. For anyone who is concerned for the future health of our country, this is profoundly worrying. I am, of course, not arguing that what the country needs is more law students, or more lawyers that is certainly not the case. But we will face a very bleak future if we do not equip many more people with the kinds of skills that studying law encourages students to develop and which we look for, and too often fail to discover even in rudimentary form, in those applying to study law at university.

I hope the third edition of Letters to a Law Student will help make some small contribution to reversing this decline in our countrys intellectual capital at least among students who are thinking of studying law, and those who are actually studying law.

. I would very much welcome hearing from you.

Nick McBride

Pembroke College, Cambridge
18 March 2013