Tag: Tutorials

Entry 39

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Feeling better today and I ended up going to the Tottennham vs Apoel match (Spurs won, so all is good in the world).  So this is another post typed on the cell, so apologies for any incorrect spelling mistakes or grammar issues.

We had an odd Equity lecture today. It was the last for the term and we spent most of it going through some revision material. It barely lasted an hour, however if we are ahead of schedule, why not? The main lesson from the lecture, is to make sure that my work is up to date before the end of the holidays, as waiting for the end of the year is just a death wish.

This was followed by Tort were we started to examine cases involving visitor liability. Understandably, children are given free reign over the world (most of the time) and are not seen as fully responsible. The issue of a rational agent vs Clapham omnibus man was evident again. Listening to some of the cases you think: “Really, how did you think jumping into a pond head first was a smart decision?” While the courts agreed with me in this particular case, when dealing with problem questions I still need to remind myself that law accepts the fallibility of man and that I shouldn’t be going too hard on the people I read about.

Finally I will quickly talk about my public law work. For the class on Friday we have to represent a German citizen post Brexit who has lost their right to work. And quite frankly I think he is screwed. There is no international treaty to help him (just loads of recommendations), as he is not a refugee or an asylum seeker. Can parliament do this? Yeah, it can do what ever it wants. Would it? Maybe not intentionally…but hey, have you seen the UK government? They make the simple look impossible and the make the impossible a fantasy.

Entry 38

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For those not in touch with me personally, I have not been well over the last few days and have been experiencing a migraine over the weekend where I was bedridden and even turning on the lights was too much. What this led to, was the most unproductive weekend of my life in ages, though understandably so. What this meant, is this week I have not any work prepared for my classes. Not something I recommend, this morning I was struggling to stand, but the Gujarati inside of me just screamed that I needed to make value for money (regarding the course, I mean, it is 11K!).

Today I started off with Equity, and I couldn’t keep my eyes on my computer screen. It was just far too bright, and the room in general with the lights on was too much. Honestly, I didn’t gain too much from the tutorial as I was feeling dizzy. I could have gone home after this, but I decided to go the public law lecture as I was already there.

I felt better in the lecture, though my laptop was playing up a bit in the first-half. We had a quick recap of judicial review and then moved onto domestic tribunals. It’s not that interesting of a topic (at least for me) when looking at the rules of dog racing and performance-enhancing drugs. Or even horses for that matter. When it comes to domestic tribunals, we were told that if it was a consensual relationship and that the body doesn’t complete governing functions, you cannot bring a case to a public law court as it is a private matter. Here begins the difference between the two sets of law. I want to do more reading on this before commenting as I think there is more overlap than accepted at the moment but this is based more on belief and not on law.

Finally, we had a  land tutorial were we looked at mortgages. Now we haven’t covered mortgages fully in lecture, so having a class on it felt premature. However, in the breaks, I was able to get some questions done. My answers when coming to an opinion (not the law) seem to be far harsher than any legal bodies. This is not too worrying regarding my legal career as I do not intend become a judge. I link this to my rational agent perspective, where I do not think of the Clapham Omnibus man, but the fully rational being with full information. While there is no pressing problem, this shortfall in economics seems to be showing more cracks daily where it becomes a more untenable position to hold; especially considering the case law.

Entry 36

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Today started off with the tutorial in EU law. We were going through on how to answer a problem question accurately regarding EU law (this seems to be a running theme this week). I feel as though I’ve written the following quite a few times now: the treaties matter! Do not ever forget this. For learning purposes, it makes things quite simple for myself. Learn the essential statutes related to each topic and Bob’s your uncle! Obviously one could just look them up in the statute book, but in a time-pressured exam, it’s better to know them 100% (or at least all of it and have it tabbed).

After this, I headed off to my Land law lecture, where we started the law of mortgages. Let me just say, while it is seemly straightforward, there is a ton of work. For this just stand-alone section, we have around 5-6 hours worth of lectures! Also, we were informed by our lecturer that this part of the law is an essentially, for all intensive purposes, a standalone section. This means that I have a choice to make, I could just ditch this part of the law and not bother with it (though if I ever went into a practising land lawyer, I would have to know) or keep it to answer the most uncomplicated and straightforward questions for the exams. At the moment, I am leaning to learning it well, not just for the exams, but also I expect that my mother will ask me hundred-and-one questions about her set of mortgages. It’s not much to ask for, considering the support that I have been given to pursue this.

Finally, I ended the day with a lecture in EU law. Today we looked at the role domestic courts have concerning the ECJ when dealing with references to the court. We looked at whether this was a vertical or horizontal relationship. The answer to this depends on the court in question, as the courts that cannot be appealed against have been granted the right to interpret EU law for the entirety of the EU. This relationship would suggest a horizontal style one, however with the role of supremacy and the ECJ wanting to ensure that EU laws are interpreted correctly (whatever that is meant to mean), then it holds supremacy (as you may recall from previous blog posts/ non-binding opinion poll campaigns). It’s quite a touchy subject, but it makes sense that the EU holds supremacy as it about looking after the common market. How can have a “common market” with different rules inside? That’s why we have deference to the ECJ. Quite simply, it’s spelt out in the treaties.

Entry 34

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Back to University after an action pack weekend!

So, a quick update on yesterday. I had to hand in my Public Law essay, while I had written most of the essay about two weeks ago, after going to office hours and having a class about what is expected in my essay, I had to redo my essay with what is expected from me regarding the class. Namely, to use the cases presented to me in class. This links today where at the end of my day, I had another set of office hours regarding problem questions. The way I would tackle these questions, which would also explain why I was having trouble with contributing to class, was that I would not consult the case law first. I would follow my natural instincts of what would be the logical solution to the problem presented and then see how case law could be applied in this situation. In essence, I was trying to induce what I thought was the correct argument, rather than deduced from the case law. Overcoming this barrier, won’t be difficult. However, I do think that I will need to sit down for longer periods to work on this. It might also explain why I enjoy land law the most (yes, the last couple of weeks are an exception), even if I do deduce something, I have to relate it the statute which gives me more of a definitive answer.

This morning I had a tutorial in Tort Law, and we just went over the one essay question and one problem question, both relating Psychiatric Harm. I don’t have much to say on the topic, other than there is quite a lot to be desired. The current state of the law is that the common law courts seem to be afraid to change the current standings and want parliament to take over. We then look at parliament and see…. well, what can only be described as a shamble, where psychiatric harm is not exactly on top of the agenda. The issues relating to cases about Hillsborough were seeing your sibling being in physical harm, as not a good enough reason for causing trauma (as a given) is ridiculous. What about your best friend? Nope. I think that the Judges on the case must have had no relationships beyond their own nuclear family. Otherwise, I cannot imagine how anyone could see this as being reasonable.

This was followed by Public Law this week, which was about Judicial Review and how it works in English law. It is a depressingly boring topic, though incredibly important. How do you review agencies that do work on behalf of the government and who can hold them accountable? It shouldn’t be dry as it is. I did make one change today, which is to type up my lecture notes, during the class. Honestly, I did get more written down than before. The reason I haven’t been doing so was that I expected my exams to be handwritten and thus wished to practice for it. However, I have found out that I shall be typing my exams and thus I will make a transition across. Though I will probably retain writing out cases by hand. As cases are not about all the facts that happened (not unimportant though), rather what does this case mean?

And with that, I’ll leave you.

Entry 29

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Another Friday entry written on the phone. Sorry for the spelling and grammar mistakes. (Hopefully I will not make this a habit. I dearly miss sleep)

Today I had just Criminal Law, with a lecture in the morning and then a tutorial in the afternoon.

In today’s lecture we continued with our look into Homicide, particularly in the sense of manslaughter. The actus reas is the same in murder, so what we explored is the difference in mens rea.
From a consequentialist view (totally not discussed this in class, nor in the same way) there is no difference between the two. However the Law takes more of a deontological view, in that the intentions do natter. However looking through the case law with Woollins and statutes regarding loss of control, this is not always the case. From Woollins, there was too large of scope to determine if the case was murder and in the areas regarding strict liability there seems to be a disregard for the mens rea in order to stop love (or in the words of the professor: luuuv) crimes being justified (such as infidelity causing loss of control). So the law seems to differ here and places normative values (nod to public law (total in joke) ) into the legal system, which I would argue should be left to the jury. Not the judge or parliamentarians to decide.

The tutorial is pretty much a continuation of the lecture, but we were given some feedback on the coursework we handed in. Apparently we were quite impressive, but I’ll wait and see when I get back my paper.

Also, almost done with my public law essay. So at least there’s that. However this weekend is all about the North London Derby!

Entry 26

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Welcome back to another exciting week. Yesterday I had a productive day in the library, and I was able to get my work for Tuesday (today) and Wednesday (tomorrow) finished, as well as starting on my essay which is due in two weeks. The essay is in Public Law and is about the Diceyan Orthodoxy and how it’s relevance in today’s world.

Today I started my day off with a Tort Law tutorial, and I was well prepared for the class regarding content, but I think I need to find a place to put all these cards. I have so many that it is hard to find the case I wish to talk about. Say I want case X, I have over 100 cases to go find it (this is in Tort alone) and thus need to be more selective ion what I am carrying. Also, by not colour coding the cards to a particular section of the law, it gets a bit confusing. I plan on using some paper clips for the interim, but I’ll probably have to string tie them when sections are complete.

I also want to talk about a question we went through today. The way the tutor went through the question was through many cases regarding breach and how they relate the situation (I do realise how vague this may seem). The hypothetical example was a factory worker being hurt and how would we advise them given the specific facts. The thing that stood out to me was that the accident was foreseeable. Hence, I found one case that said if it was unforeseeable we could not find the breach. The logic being, if this is the case; then the reverse must be true. I then just applied some simple economic reasoning which merely is a cost-benefit analysis. I’ve assumed that the factory owner and industry (who have the same practice) have concluded the following: P(risk)X(Cost of Risk)>Benefit. Thus, while they are not negligent, they are aware of the risk and should be liable for damages, otherwise it cannot be a foreseeable (or reasonable evaluation of the) risk. I’m not 100% about this, so I’ll be heading to office hours on Thursday.

After this I had this, I had Public Law, and we went to the European Community and Union laws. This tied nicely into my essay as we essentially examined the concept of Supremacy from the viewpoint of Public Law, as well finally looking at the Miller case. Unfortunately, in the lecture, we didn’t dive into this in quite enough detail for my liking. However, since my essay is around the issues of what parliament can do, I’ll be able to incorporate it into my piece hopefully.

Entry 21

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Today we can call Criminal Law Day. As any student can attest, there is nothing better than a two lecture on a Friday morning at 9am. This was evident in the morning where most of the class were running into the lecture theatre.

We spent the lecture continuing on causation and looking at mens rea and actus rea. Just like tort law we only spend our time going through cases. However, there was a notable exception today in a lecture where our lecture ran from one corner of the hall to the centre and gave a fake kick. He was so full of joy, he did it again! It was otherwise just a standard lecture with no other significant points to mention other than I have continued with the card method to write down cases.

The day ended with a Criminal Law Tutorial (hence Criminal Law Day). We started off the class by going through a problem question together (that none of us seen) and going about the method to answer a question about criminal liability. While this was a beneficial part of the class, couldn’t help but wonder why this wasn’t done before. Oh well, c’est la vie. We then went onto the tutorial questions set for this week.

So that’s one more week done. Thank you for the continuing support.

Entry 20

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Alright, I’m still a bit high from yesterday’s win. But can you really blame me? Spent the whole day with a massive grin on my face (which is quite usual for me come to think about it or see any of my photos…). Today I was back into the thick of things with EU Law tutorial& lecture, with Land law in between.I’ll quickly start with yesterday, which was a double whammy of Tort and Equity.

Yesterday saw the beginning of my new process of using note cards (see attached picture). I actually found this a magnificent way to get cases down in lecture as well as you for tutorial preparation. As each case is on a small note card, it forces me to just stick to the main details of the case and the decisions by the judge. All in all, this is beneficial for keeping things in order as well being used for revision in the future as I am making flashcards as we go on. I definitely prefer this to mind maps as I can always just write a new card if I make too many errors or find that I want to change things on the card. Maybe that’s part of the perfectionist inside of me. Don’t like to see lots of crossed out things from a resource I wish to learn from. (though if you were to see my A4 notes in lecture, boy or boy is it messy)

This was after an Equity Lecture where I kept on with my business and where we explored formalities. I’m going, being honest with the fact that I’m still grappling with the concept of formalities and probably to spend a bit of time over the weekend re-reading the cases and the and the textbook. The one major thing that I did take away from the issue of formalities is that by just doing the paperwork correctly; saves everyone a heck of a time and that being clear and precise is worth its weight in gold.

Today I started my day pinching myself, to check that last night wasn’t a dream…I mean…

Today started with my EU tutorial where we spent the majority of our time discussing the mechanics of Article 50. The triggering, the process of how it works and the consequences of the Article. Hopefully, I want to go into a full Brexit rant again but sometimes it just really annoying to see how people don’t understand one of the most crucial issues of our time (in Britain). In class, we talked about the vagueness of the Article and with such broad scope how this is detrimental in some ways; no one expected it to be triggered thus not fleshed out. In other ways, positive; I’ll say that it is positive because countries may leave for different reasons and this having a strict set of things that one must negotiate about, might just be a waste of time. We also looked at the reasoning of why the British government wants to start negotiating the trade deal as soon as possible and why the EU is using its’ hand to wait longer (as there is that two year limit in the treaty). This led onto the why there may need to be a transition period for non-business reasons but rather simplifying the legal route to a free trade agreement. I then brought up the fact the Article doesn’t mention us withdrawing our letter of notifying us leaving (hence saying lol jk Yurop. We’re staying fam, it was only a prank!).  Basically, it’ll probably go to the ECJ where the UK would have to fight to stay in and that the other nations might just want to throw us out. We did also discuss supremacy, but I’ve written quite a bit so far.

Then we had Land law which was just looking at propriety rights and how they transfer depending on the exchange (see section 288/29 of the Land Registration Act 2002). I wish I could say anything more, other than this, but it is a dense topic (quite rightly). Land law is becoming my favourite module, due to it’s adherence to rules to the letter.

I finally had my final lecture of the day, which was a return to EU Law. I don’t know how many times I’m going to have to write this but; THE TREATIES MATTER! Don’t bother criticising EU law until you wrap your head around this concept. It just really helps you put things into perspective when there a decision is made that seems out of place. We spent the majority of the lecture looking at how directives work and the implementations into the domestic courts worked. Essentially directives (not in themselves,  but from the case law resulting from them) give the citizens the power to the government to court over the failure to implement EU law. Why is this important, the common market requires regulation and the best people to regulate the market? The people who gain the most from the market! The consumers. I mean the citizens!

There’s probably more I can say on the topic, but I’ve typed out far more than intended to make up for yesterday (though I wouldn’t change it).

Entry 18

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Looks who’s back after reading week! So for the first time in my entire academic career, I actually used my reading week for academic reading. Don’t worry I also had some downtime by going to see some family and reading the first book of Dust by Philip Pullman. Hope you all had a lovely week, but I know deep down that you were missing my writing.
Back to the academics.
So today started off with a tutorial in Tort Law. Where we just explored the questions set out prior. While it was there was nothing wrong with the class itself, I have noticed my inability to use authorities in my own answers. This is to say that I am still struggling to note down where I have gotten my answers from an who said what. So even if I noted down a case and gone through the decisions in an appeal court, then I have not said what Judge said what. While this isn’t disastrous for me at the moment, it will start to catch up if I don’t change this. My plan to combat this was a trip to the stationary store and buying some proper note cards which I shall start using for cases. The idea is to write down less irrelevant information and try to get more focus what is happening in each case. (Also should make this nightly job simpler)

Then I had a Public Law lecture. I usually have loads to write about public law, but today, this won’t be able to happen just due to the sheer amount of information that was covered in today’s class. We explored the history prerogative power, the use of the power, what happens when it conflicts with statutory authority and how governments have tried to use the Royal Prerogative to circumvent statutory power (and failed). I am sure that by the end of the year I will hear the following phrase over a million times; “Why? Parliament is Sovereign!” It’s basically the crux of any argument of why the government of the day does anything. Not a bad thing or something that doesn’t make sense, but it is getting a tad repetitive now. The only thing to note of any concern is the lack of judicial review to prerogative powers (at least before GCHQ). While it has been updated to work in hand with the nature of the power, it doesn’t seem to go far enough (if I am talking from a lawyers point of view). However, if I were a politician, I would think that things have swung in the wrong direction. If we (the ruling party) had been elected, there should be a minimal amount of barriers to stop us doing what we were put into office for by the people. All in all, considering that there have only been four cases (or we were told that and I have yet to do my readings) on the issue since 1688, it’s been a pretty good run.

Entry 14

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Today was a tripleheader of Equity, Public and Land Law. However, more important than all three, Tottenham played Real Madrid at the Santiago Bernabeu, so as an avid Spurs fan that has eaten up into my time to write this blog post.

In today’ tutorial for Equity and trusts, we continued to examine trusts and the purposes for today’s class we spent our day looking at discretionary trusts. What I took from the class (which is relevant to all the areas of law) is the importance of wording when describing what is happening in the trust, i.e. is this a trust or a power of appointment. While in writing them we care about the words, this might not have been the case for the settler, so we must also consider the importance of the meaning (or intent) of the settler. While the latter might not always be upheld, especially if the wording is loose, it should not just be disregarded.  That is to say, the use of precatory words do not create trusts, but nor do they prevent trusts.

Then I had my lecture in public law. We have continued to look at the result of cases regarding common law to create retrospective laws, which seems to be fine ( the example of marital rape) but don’t seem okay when Parliament does so (the Burmah Oil example). I do not think that is a problem in a legal sense for Parliament to have retrospective laws, Parliament is sovereign. It can do what it wants. Putting on my political scientist hat for a few minutes; they won’t do whatever pleases them or suits them due to game theory. While Parliament as an institution can do whatever it wants, MPs cannot. They are bound to their electorate and baring a civil war, or a revolution will be at the will of the people (precisely not what the Daily Mail refers to, I jest). Also, Parliament has to deal with foreign governments, and if they wish to conduct business with them over time (repetitive game), then they have little interest to defect to changing what they agreed to in the past (bit more commentary on Brexit: Britain will give money to the EU decades after leaving (it’s the pensions that have already been agreed. Don’t like it? Tough, we decided to it and if we want to prove to others that we are going to keep our word when coming to future trade deals. No project fear, just bleeding reality).

Gone slightly off topic…

Finally, we had our first tutorial in land law. I must say that the change in preparations really paid off. While I did not contribute to the class, I was able to stay on top of what everyone saying and understand points being raised. And as always, Land Law is about being anal, though not seemingly in the case eofManchester Aiport Plc v Dutton. While I would like to go on. I have far surpassed my word limit if you want to know more, just shoot me a message.

PS. Hugo Lloris, what a man!