The BA and the Graduate BA

ITS PURPOSE

The idea is not that you should simply emerge, after three years, better informed about law than you were before coming to Oxford. Our aim is to enable you to develop your own intellectual ability and critical acumen. We aim to equip you to deal with the difficult parts of moral, legal and political argument. This is done by immersion for three or four years in an organised system of the best lectures and tutorials.

IT’S YOUR DEGREE

Our Oxford law programmes prioritise intensive independent work for tutorials. Tutorials are weekly meetings between a tutor and a group of two or three students, for which each student normally writes an essay. The focus of the tutorial is on the student’s work. It gives you not only feedback on progress, but an expert response to your own arguments. The workload and the intellectual demands are high but the rewards of such close academic attention are great.

THE GRADUATE BA

We welcome students who have completed a degree in another subject to pursue the BA in Jurisprudence. They can pursue the regular BA programme like other BA students, but a number of colleges also consider graduate applicants to read for the graduate BA in two years as ‘Senior Status’ students. The two-year course is particularly demanding as subjects are studied at a quicker pace than on the three-year programme. As a result, colleges generally require that successful applicants for the two-year Senior Status law course will normally have achieved a first class degree or equivalent. Where a candidate for the two-year Senior Status course has not recently been pursuing formal academic qualifications, colleges will generally require strong and convincing evidence, at an equivalent level to a first class degree, of the candidate’s achievements and future promise. For information about admission to the Senior Status BA please refer to the University website.