attorney bar association

my name is graham virgo. i’m a member ofthe faculty of law at the university of cambridge, and i want to provide some answers to thequestion as to why you should study law at university if you want to become a practisinglawyer. if you are thinking that you might eventuallywish to pursue a career as a lawyer, whether a solicitor or a barrister, there are twodifferent ways of getting the necessary qualifications. one is to study any subject at universityother than law, then do a one-year law conversion course and finally complete the relevant vocationalcourse to become a solicitor or a barrister. the other route is to study law at university,typically for three years, and then take the relevant vocational course.there are various myths about which route

you should adopt. one myth is that employersprefer applicants who have not studied law at university. that is simply not the case.statistics indicate that half the successful applicants to the legal profession have takenthe conversion course and the other half have studied law at university. studying a subjectother than law and then taking the conversion course is a perfectly legitimate route tobecome a lawyer. but so is studying law at university. if you are unsure which routeto take, then one factor to bear in mind is that if you really enjoy one of the subjectsyou are studying at school and wish to study it at university, then do so. studying thatsubject will not bar your route to becoming a practising lawyer and it is likely to enableyou to develop skills which will be of benefit

to work as a lawyer. but studying law at universitywill also enable you to acquire knowledge and develop skills which will be of real benefitto your future career as a lawyer and indeed many other professions as well. so what arethe advantages of studying law at university generally and studying law at cambridge specifically? i think there are five particular advantages.the first is acquiring breadth and depth of knowledge.at cambridge most law students study 14 papers over three years. seven of these are the foundationpapers which must be taken if you wish to become a practising lawyer. these papers arestudied in a conversion course, but concentrated within the space of one year. at cambridgethe foundation papers are studied in detail

throughout the three year course, but sevenother papers are studied as well. this means that you can choose to study a wide varietyof subjects, ranging from legal history to philosophy, from commercial law to criminology,from family law to international law, and many other subjcts as well. consequently,studying law at university enables you to gain depth and breadth in your understandingof the law, which cannot be acquired during a law conversion coruse, and also enablesyou to see how different legal subjects fit together. the second advantage of studying law at university,is that it enables you to learn to think like a lawyer.being able to study law in three years gives

you the chance to develop your ability tothink and write like a lawyer, to use and understand technical vocabulary, to applythe law to resolve difficult problems and to analyse and engage with a wide varietyof legal arguments. the advantage of the small group teaching system at cambridge means thatyou get a great deal of support from your teachers in being able to think and analysethe law. you also get a great deal of support in developing legal writing skills. thinkingand writing about the law are not skills which necessarily come naturally, but which taketime to develop through practice. being able to study law in three years gives you theopportunity to develop those skills. a third advantage of studying law at universityis that it encourages critical engagement.

studying law at university means that youare studying law as an academic subject. it follows that you are encouraged to reflecton the law, to think critically about the law, to consider whether the law is satisfactory,to identify the policies which underpin particular rules and to suggest alternatives. this oftenrequires you to engage with other academic disciplines, such as economics, social policy,history and philosophy. there are also opportunities to study law in another european country andso gain the benefit of developing language skills and to see how law is applied and developedin a different legal system. having studied a law degree might also enable you to pursuepostgraduate legal studies either in cambridge, at another uk university or at a universityabroad, such as a us law school like harvard,

which is generally not possib le without alaw degree. fourthly, studying law at university enablesyou to develop other legal skills. it enables you to develop other skills and gain otherexperiences which will be of real benefit to a future career as a lawyer. for example,it is possible to participate in mooting competitions and so gain experience of presenting a legalargument in front of a judge, or to participate in pro bono work and provide legal supportto real people facing real problems. a fifth advantage of studying law at universityconcerns cost. by studying law at cambridge in three years and then proceeding to obtainprofessional qualification means that you can become a practising lawyer without needingto do the conversion course, because you will

already have studied the seven foundationsubjects as part of your law course. this means that you do not need to pay for an additionalyear of study. a significant number of people who study lawat cambridge do not become practising lawyers, and even some who do then move on to othercareers, including business, politics, the civil service, banking, journalism, in internationalorganisations or the voluntary sector and academia. also, if you are interested in studyinga subject other than law at cambridge, you can often change to law at the end of yourfirst or second year and study law at cambridge for two years, during which you study 10 papers,seven of which are the foundation subjects. but most people who study law at cambridgetake the three year course and then proceed

to become a practising lawyer. they find thatthe knowledge and skills they have acquired during their university legal studies areof real benefit to their future career. genuinely, studying law at cambridge enablesyou to think like a lawyer, and there’s a lot more information about studying lawat cambridge on the faculty of law website.