Any 2nd Year Law Students?

butterball2

Hi all,

I am hoping someone here may be able to help me. I've just finished JF law and really want to do schols next year. However, I have heard that Land Law is really hard - would anyone be able to give me a rough idea of what came up on the summer Land Law exam a couple of weeks ago. I have heard the prof likes to repeat questions and just wanna check it out before deciding whether to do it or not.

I'm not that much of an eager beaver just figured I might get a response now while the paper is still in peoples head and everyone disperses for summer.

Anyway thank you for any help.

Rhadamanthus

Hi there, I'm one of those second year (third year now, I guess) law people you're looking for, as it happens. The hysteria that surrounds Land Law is, at least to some extent, overblown. If you bother to show up to the lectures (which, fyi, never change timewise, so if you've seen this year's timetable you can expect pretty much the same type of setup next year) then you should be able to keep pace nicely. It isn't a simple subject by any means, but scaremongering seems to dog it and make it worse. I get the feeling a lot of people enter Land with a preconceived notion that they're just not going to understand it and it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Keep an open mind about it, I guess.

I could tell you what came up on the exam, but I don't see how it would do you much good without having done the subject first? Make your decision about Land by going to lectures and actually doing the course, rather than viewing exam papers now. If you're really determined, you could always try reading a textbook or something beforehand, but Land Law has undergone significant recent reforms, and it may be difficult to wrap your head around all of that without their significance being drawn to your attention in lectures.

Anyway, I know you've emphasised that you're not that eager, but I'd recommend you try to restrict your focus to your annuals for the moment. Schols is a long way away yet, as is Land. Check out the way our schol papers are structured if you haven't already. It is possible to avoid Land if you feel you want to or must. So, if your concern was that you'd be locked into what is regarded as a confusing and difficult subject: don't worry, you're not.

butterball2

Great, thank you for your advice! Out of curiosity how did you find the other subjects in SF?

Rhadamanthus

No problem at all! I'm sorry if I sounded a bit negative, by the way. I think it's great you're already thinking about working for schols, keep that spirit up. I can just say from personal experience that studying ahead for Land has a poor input:reward ratio. My advice for now would be to wait for your annual exam results and then assess where you're at and what/how you need to improve, where your strengths and weaknesses are, etc. If you do that first, you can see where you go from there, maybe?

As for the other SF subjects, I found them probably less interesting than those done in JF, but as you study them you see why they're so important/foundational. They're a matter of personal taste to some extent. From the point of view of difficulty, I wouldn't say they're necessarily harder than those in JF, though they might have some quirks that make them tricky (equity being a parallel stream of authority distinct from the common law, administrative law being public law as opposed to the many private law subjects studied). Beyond that, I don't really know what else to say about them, unless you had some specific questions about any of them (and feel free to PM me if you do, or talk to your mentor/tutor/etc). Since people seem to have lots of different reasons for finding law interesting or studying it, so even something that I personally hated could end up being your favourite subject.