Super-Curriculars for Law: Read One Judgment Properly

There is one law super-curricular that is free, available to everyone, and better than almost anything else you could do. Most applicants skip it.

Read a UK Supreme Court judgment. Then read the dissent.

Every judgment is published free at supremecourt.uk, with press summaries written for people who are not lawyers. You do not need permission, money, a connection in the profession, or a school that runs a law society.

Why the judgment beats everything else

A law degree is three years of reading judgments. That is the activity. Not debating, not watching legal dramas, not listening to podcasts about the law — reading a court's reasoning and working out whether it holds.

So a student who has done a small amount of that, badly, has done the actual thing. A student who has listened to forty hours of legal podcasts has done something adjacent to it.

The dissent is what makes it work. A majority judgment on its own reads as the answer. Put the dissent beside it and you have two competent, senior judges reaching opposite conclusions from the same facts and the same law. That is the discovery every law student makes in their first term, and arriving with it already made is unusual.

It also produces the best possible interview material. "Which judgment have you read and who do you think was right?" is a question you can prepare for and most candidates cannot answer.

Where to start if you have never read one

Do not pick the most famous case. Pick one where the court split.

The press summary comes first — it is a page, it tells you what the dispute was, and it stops you drowning. Then read the majority. Then the dissent. Then decide who convinced you and write down why in three sentences.

Constitutional and public law cases tend to be the most accessible to a non-lawyer because the facts are usually about government rather than about a technical commercial arrangement. Cases on the limits of executive power, on rights, and on statutory interpretation are all readable with effort.

Expect it to be hard. You will not follow all of it. That is the honest experience and it is fine to say so in an interview — what matters is whether you engaged with the reasoning, not whether you mastered it.

The rest of the ladder

Court visits. Magistrates' and Crown Courts have public galleries and you can walk in free. A morning in a magistrates' court is a corrective to every legal drama you have watched: it is mostly procedural, mostly quick, and mostly about people with chaotic lives. Applicants who have been say noticeably more grounded things about the justice system.

Mooting and debating. Useful, with a caveat. Mooting teaches you to argue a legal position under pressure, which is the skill. Debating teaches you to argue anything, which is a different skill and slightly less relevant. If your school runs neither, the judgment reading substitutes fine.

Essay competitions. Several are open to sixth-formers and a serious attempt is real evidence of legal writing. You do not need to win — the process of constructing a legal argument to a word limit is the value.

Pathways to Law. Free two-year Sutton Trust programme for state-school students: university sessions, mentoring, and work experience with a firm. If you are eligible, it is the single best structured option available.

Reading. Letters to a Law Student is the standard recommendation and it is genuinely good, which is also why it appears in an enormous number of statements. Read it, but do not build the paragraph on it. Tom Bingham's The Rule of Law is a step up and more distinctive.

Solicitor or barrister? You do not have to know

A surprising number of law statements try to commit to a branch of the profession. There is no need, and doing it badly costs you.

Across the Law courses we hold official outcome data for, 38% of graduates are working as legal professionals fifteen months after finishing. That is a high concentration, but it also means a substantial number are not — law degrees lead into business, public service, finance and policy in significant numbers, and nobody thinks worse of that.

Admissions tutors are recruiting to a degree, not to a career. Certainty about a branch you have never seen from the inside reads as performance.

What law statements get wrong

Justice as an abstraction. "I have always believed in justice" is not a position, because nobody believes in injustice. Say something specific about a case where you think the law got it wrong, and why.

Television. Suits and its equivalents have appeared in so many statements that mentioning legal drama is actively risky.

Current-affairs opinion without law. A strong opinion on a political controversy is not a legal argument. The legal question is usually narrower and more technical than the political one, and showing you can see the difference is exactly what is being assessed.

The family connection. A parent who is a solicitor is not evidence of your interest. What you did because of that access might be.

Listing. Four activities in four clauses is the standard weak paragraph. One case, engaged with properly, beats it every time.

A word on the LNAT

Not a super-curricular, but it is part of the decision at Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, KCL, LSE, Bristol, Durham and Glasgow among ours. It tests comprehension and argument rather than legal knowledge, which means the judgment reading above genuinely helps: it is practice at extracting a structure of reasoning from difficult prose.

Common questions

Do I need legal work experience? No. Firms rarely take sixth-formers, admissions tutors know this, and its absence costs you nothing. Reading and court visits are the substitutes and they are respected.

Should I do an EPQ on a legal topic? It is a strong option, because it produces a sustained argument you designed. Pick a question narrow enough to answer.

How many cases should I read? One, properly, with the dissent. Two if you want to compare. More than three and you are collecting rather than thinking.

Is a law podcast worth listening to? For orientation, yes. As the centrepiece of your statement, no — it is secondary material where the primary material is free and one click away.

Does Law at Oxbridge want something different? The same thing, harder. Oxford's Law offer rate across its subject group is around one in nine applications. What distinguishes candidates there is not more activities but sharper reasoning about fewer.

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Writ coaches the new three-question UCAS statement with a rubric written for Law. It never writes a word of your statement — it asks the questions an admissions tutor would ask about the argument you made, until the argument holds. Try it free.