Development Programme

Oxford’s Faculty of Law is home to a unique combination of common law learning and comparative and international jurisprudence. Oxford holds a leading position in connecting teaching and scholarship, common law and civil law, theory and practice.

With the largest faculty of law in the United Kingdom, Oxford is at the forefront of innovation, and is a meeting place for ideas and for gifted teachers and students from around the world. In the 21st century we are making new contributions to understanding, and to the education of lawyers at the highest level. We are doing so on the foundation of a great heritage. Law has been taught at Oxford since the 1100s, and the University was the first to engage in the study of the common law when it appointed the world’s first professor of English Law (William Blackstone, the Vinerian Professor of English Law) in the 1750s.

Today the Faculty offers an outstanding law degree, the BA in Jurisprudence, which is taught through tutorials in which the student receives the response of the professors to his or her own arguments. The challenge of a tutorial has a very direct value in equipping our students for practice as advocate, advisor, or judge: every week our students are being trained in the lawyer’s task of defending a controversial point of view as to how to solve a difficult legal problem. The graduate BCL, MJur, and Master’s in Law and Finance use the same tutorial technique in a world-leading graduate law programme. And our students gain from the University’s place as a nexus between the worlds of the common law and the civil law.

Oxford’s teaching and research in Law are becoming increasingly international. We are globalizing our work through a programme of interaction with law schools and our alumni around the world, designed to improve our own understanding of the developing environment, and to bring the world’s best students and academics to Oxford.

Because of our increasingly transnational role, we are developing a whole new business model. It will involve research funding, and support from alumni. And it must involve investment by the legal profession. The support that we receive from the leading firms has given us a crucial capacity to pursue excellence. If you want to play your part in the future of a great law school, please contact the Law Faculty Alumni and Development Office.