Commercial Bar Scholarships

A number of years ago £40,000 was raised from silks at the Commercial Bar (led by Michael Crystal QC) to support graduate law scholarships at Oxford. The law faculty has now launched a wider appeal to the Commercial Bar to raise more substantial funds to support graduate law scholarships for post- graduate law degrees at Oxford (whether research degrees like the D.Phil or taught degrees like the BCL).

Extract from the speech of Professor Burrows at the Commercial Bar reception held on March 6 at the Oxford Cambridge Club

I would like to say something about postgraduate law at Oxford and to explain where the Commercial Bar Scholarships fit in.

We believe that we have the most vibrant postgraduate law programme in the world, which has been developed considerably over the last fifteen years or so. Our flagship remains the BCL, which is the premier one-year taught course for postgraduate lawyers from a common law background. In 1991 we added alongside it the MJur, which is a one-year taught degree for those from a civilian background. This has been very successful. In the present year, for example, we have some 90 students on the BCL, 60 on the MJur, and together they represent 44 countries.

In addition, we have been expanding our capacity to meet the ever-increasing demand for research degrees in law, in particular for the DPhil, which, as you will probably know, entails writing a thesis of 100,000 words over a three-year period. At present, we have some 160 postgraduate students embarked on research degrees. So together with the BCL/MJur we have about 300 law postgraduates, in addition to our 800 or so undergraduates.

The problem we face is that the funding for postgraduate degrees is scarce. The main public funding for home students comes through the Arts and Humanities Research Council awards, which are extremely competitive and relatively few in number. Similarly, with the Overseas Research Student Awards. While the central university does allocate some funding to the Law Faculty for graduate assistance, we are aware of a considerable number of candidates who meet Oxford's stringent admissions criteria but simply cannot obtain the necessary funding.

Within the Law Faculty, we have therefore sought private funding to create a number of scholarships for graduate study. In addition to the long-standing Winter Williams Scholarship, there have been in recent years two principal privately-funded Law Faculty Graduate Scholarship schemes. The first is the Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer Scholarships of which there are five awards annually of £5000 each; and the second is the Commercial Bar Scholarships of which there are 2 awards annually of £7,500 to cover one year of a research degree.

The funding for these Commercial Bar Scholarships came a few years ago from the generosity of a number of commercial silks headed by Michael Crystal QC. Unfortunately the money raised then will shortly have run out and what we are therefore seeking to do is to raise more significant sums from the Commercial Bar so as to ensure that these Commercial Bar Scholarships can continue.

We are intending that the scholarships should remain as annual awards of £7,500 but we would like to expand the range of those eligible so as to include those applying for taught courses, such as the BCL/MJur, as well as research degrees.

I should emphasise two points:

(1) The scholarships are only available for those who have already been accepted by the faculty and college; in other words they are students who have met our stringent admissions standards; and

(2) The scholarships are awarded by a committee comprising members of the Law Faculty which takes into account a range of criteria including the financial circumstances of the applicant and, as regards a research degree, the academic merit of the proposed area of research.

Should you wish to donate to the Commercial Bar Scholarship fund, the form is available below or contact Maureen O'Neill at maureen.oneill@law.ox.ac.uk, telephone 01865 281198 (+44 1865 281198 from outside UK)

• Gift form (PDF file)