The LL.M. Subject Forum is an event held at the beginning of each academic year to help current LL.M. students decide which courses to take. Course convenors for each course discuss for approximately 10 minutes the goals and objectives of their course. Potential applicants to the LL.M. viewing this video must bear in mind the students who were in the audience were intended as the target audience. Most of the courses offered each year will run in subsequent years, but not necessarily all of them. Please see The LL.M. Curriculum for more information.

Transcript

Good afternoon everybody. My name’s Roderick Munday and, along with Matt Dyson – who isn’t here, doesn’t appear to be, there’s no reason why he should be – I run the Comparative Law course. This is, as you know, a course which operates by way of dissertation, and, of course, the dissertation you write is a comparative one. Comparing what? Well, because you’re in an English institution of higher learning, I think if you’re going to offer to do a comparative dissertation, one of the elements simply has to be English law, so that’s one restriction. The second thing I would say is that, if you’re contemplating doing a comparative dissertation, then make sure that you really do have a clearly defined subject, one that is not, as it were, too wide. Matt Dyson and I will not be prescribing topics for you; it’s entirely for you to have some consuming interest or burning desire to write about a particular topic. I would say one thing and that is that unless you really do want to do a dissertation, don’t inflict a miserable year upon yourselves by doing something which your heart actually isn’t really in. The comparative dissertation, when we look at your provisional titles, ought not to encompass too many jurisdictions. Two is good, three can work, but once you get beyond that I think it all becomes rather questionable. So, once again, restrict the subject matter rather carefully.

If you are contemplating doing this course, and it does involve quite a lot of organisation for us in the early couple of weeks, could I suggest that you just send me a very brief email, I mean very brief, giving me an indication, expressing interest and giving me some general notion of what it is you want to do? If you can also copy in Dr Dyson, who’s now a Fellow of Trinity College, then that might be helpful as well, because it just allows us to prepare the ground a little bit.

The other thing I ought to say about writing a comparative dissertation is that there are a number of other course on the LLM on which it’s open to you to write dissertations and, if your topic falls within one of those other courses, then I’m bound to say that that course is probably the proper destination for you rather than just the general comparative law course. I’m thinking that if you’re doing something like international human right, then clearly you should be doing the international human rights paper.

The dissertation, as the regulation states, is 18,000 words, excluding bibliography. This really does mean 18,000 words, because the view we take is that writing to this narrow size is precisely part of the exercise, so although technically you can apply for an extension, such things are very rarely granted. So, it is, as it were, part of the discipline.

There are a number of dates for your diary, and obviously you’ll get this in writing in due course but I thought I’d better just prepare you for what actually is going to happen during the course of the year during this seminar course. The first meeting will take place between you, the postulants as it were, and Dr Dyson and myself on 12th October, that is next Wednesday between 2 o’clock and 4 o’clock in whatever broom cupboard the Faculty has allocated to us. It’s important that you attend this, you have to, because this is where we all give preliminary initial consideration to the topic that you’re proposing.

We then meet again a week later, on 19th October, at which point, because there’ll be quite a lot of emails flying around during the course of that week, we ought to be able to finalise, for those of you that it hasn’t been finalised for, exactly what it is you’re going to be doing and who is going to be looking after you. Some of you will be looked after by me, some by Dr Dyson, but in the case of some topics it seems that one really ought to have an outside specialist simply because it falls outside our rather limited area of knowledge, so sometimes one has, as it were, to negotiate another party into the deal, and this is not always a straightforward matter. Whatever, by 21st October – that is Friday fortnight, I think – the topic has to have been finalised, a supervisor has to have been arranged and you have to submit to the Faculty, by that date, the final title of your dissertation. Now, it is true that whatever title is presented doesn’t have to be the final title because, as you will see, (I don’t think the handbook is available yet, is it, so I’m telling you things you couldn’t know, but I think it’s going to appear very soon). You do actually have the right to alter the title up until, I think, the end of January, but normally that’s just tweaking the title rather than deciding you’re going to do something completely different. The dissertation itself is submitted by 1st May. So, you can see that between the end of October and the beginning of May, that’s not very long, so it’s quite an intense period of composition.

Alongside the administrative dates, there are also teaching dates, and there are really four further dates which would need to go into your diary. All this will come to you in writing, but this is just to warn you. During the course of this term, Dr Dyson and I will run two methodological sessions, two two-hour methodological sessions, and the dates that we set aside for those are Wednesday, 2nd November and Wednesday, 16th November. These sessions are compulsory and are intended to ensure that we all understand exactly what methodology applies, or can apply, and what pitfalls one needs to avoid when composing a comparative dissertation.

Next term, in January, there will be two other sessions, depending how many people actually end up doing a dissertation. I think last year we had about a dozen people. What we do is that, in January, when your work ought to be, as it were, some way towards completion, we get everybody to give a short presentation to the class, indicating where their work in progress has carried them so far and showing where it’s going to go in the future, hopefully. The dates that we set aside for that (I’m not sure I’m going to be here for them myself, but I think it may be Dr Scherpe who takes over) are 18th and 25th January. These are just short presentations, it’s perfectly informal, and they tend to be 15 or 20 minutes, perhaps a little slide show if you really must. It really is very useful, not only because it gives us an idea of how work is going, it’s reassuring for us, but I think also it’s very helpful for you because it means that you have some early target date at which you have to aim in order to begin to get the work to begin to take shape, because the last thing you want, with three written papers to do in addition to a dissertation, is to find that at a time when you’d rather be revising, you’re, as it were, losing your hair over whether you’re going to get the wretched dissertation finished. So, that is really the purpose of this; it’s not an added torture, it should really be a help and a reassurance.

Should you do a dissertation? Well, given I’m completely work-shy, the answer is no, I don’t think anybody should do dissertations, but, of course, the answer in truth is that it’s a perfectly proper activity for a graduate programme and I think that one really should encourage people, if they feel so moved, to write dissertations.

We have an extremely ugly shopping centre here in Cambridge called the Beehive Centre – I mean, it’s barbaric, the architecture. I was driving past it just a few days ago as I was mulling over this course and whether I could face it again, and I was passing over the railway bridge, close to the Beehive Centre, and there’s a very old factory there with a tall, red brick chimney, and I noticed there was some wording in very large, white painted letters, and it seemed to encapsulate my view about whether or not you should write a dissertation on the LLM. It simply said, “If not now, when? If not now, when?” I’ll leave you with that thought.

Thank you very much.

Added on 05/10/2011.

Last modified on 11/10/2011

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