Your guide to supercurriculars…where to get started
Our Schools Liaison Coordinator breaks down the many ways aspiring law students can develop their curiosity about Law. Many of the resources listed below are free or low cost and widely available.
The importance of ‘supercurriculars’ — activities that build on and enhance what you are studying in school — is especially high for subjects such as Law where most of our students do not take Law at A-levels (and indeed it isn’t a required subject at the University of Cambridge). There’s a veritable smorgasbord of opportunities out there, so knowing where to start can feel a little overwhelming
There are, thankfully, more resources than ever for students to engage with and explore their interests. We don’t believe that access to supercurriculars should be limited, so all of the resources below are publicly available, and free or low cost.
1. Books
We’ve been telling students for, well, centuries really, that to learn something, you should probably pick up a book. There are a lot of books on legal subjects and written for aspiring law students in particular. Some title that may be worth a look are:
What About Law? — Catherine Barnard, Janet O’Sullivan & Graham Virgo
Letters to a Law Student — Nick McBride
Glanville Williams: Learning the Law — A.T.H. Smith
The Law Machine — Marcel Berlins & Clare Dyer
Law and Modern Society — P.S. Atiyah
How to Do Things with Rules — William Twining & David Miers;
Eve was Framed: Women and British Justice — Helena Kennedy
Law: A Very Short Introduction — Raymond Wacks
These are just some suggestions. Don’t be afraid to read autobiographies or biography that may have a legal theme or bent to them such as the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s My Own Words or Picking Cotton by Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton (the man Thompson-Cannino wrongfully accused of sexual assault). Alexandra Wilson’s experience being a young, female, Black barrister, In Black and White: A Young Barrister’s Story of Race and Class in a Broken Justice System, offers a much-needed view on the structural problems within the British legal system. There are lots of history books that deal with legal subject matter as well. Even novels such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird can offer starting points for thinking further about the role of the law in our society, its challenges and limitations.
Most books are also easily accessible online and hardcopies or e-books can often be checked out of your local library, so learning further won’t require you to spend more money, or even leave the house.
2. Newspapers
Another supercurricular classic! We’ve been advising students for years that they should stay up on current events and read the news reports in the ‘broadsides’ such as The Guardian, The Times, and The Telegraph. Cases and a legal perspective on current events are usually highlighted in the law reporting pages. The Guardian is free to read online. The Times and the Telegraph may require subscriptions but your school or public libraries may have newspaper subscriptions you can access. Or choose to pick up the paper from your local shop once a week (for example the Law section is published in the Times on Thursdays) — one newspaper will cost you roughly the same as a large cappuccino from Costa.
Other publications to check out include Counsel Magazine (check your library for a subscription), The Financial Times, and the Economist.
3. Podcasts
The programme that launched a global cultural obsession with the podcast, The New York Times/This American Life’s Serial, is a legal one! The programme investigates the murder of Korean-American high school student Hae Min Lee in Baltimore, USA in 1999 and the conviction of her Muslim ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed for the crime, for which he continues to serve a life prison sentence. Beyond the captivating storytelling and a cultural infatuation with the ‘true crime’ genre, the programme also investigates aspects of class, race and religion in the case and the challenges and shortcomings of the American justice system. These types of programmes are great because they are excellent prompts for an interdisciplinary appreciation of a case, the law, and of the justice system itself -something we try to do in our BA Law here in Cambridge! Other podcasts that may be of interest include:
Law in Action (BBC 4)
Serial Season 3 examines the US Justice system in the Cleveland, Ohio courts (This American Life/The New York Times)
The Hearing (Thompson Reuters)
Rightsup (University of Oxford)
Some law firms also operate and maintain legal podcasts. For example, Freshfields, one of our Access and Widening Participation partner firms, has blogs and podcasts.
4. Seminar Series
One of the unexpected benefits of the pandemic has been a democratisation of academic talks.Many lecture events and seminars moved wholly online, and as we emerge out of the pandemic many speaking events are continuing in some online fashion, often as hybrid events where there are people attending both in person and online. Academic engagement is no longer limited by space and time to the ivory tower.
The Faculty of Law here at Cambridge, for example, posts seminar talks and invited speakers on various topics online via the University’s Media Streaming Service or on Apple iTunes, or even have talks recorded on our YouTube channel, speaker consent permitting. In fact, we were posting talks online well before COVID-19 brought the world to a screeching halt in March 2020! Selected lecture/seminar series include:
Lauterpacht Centre for International Law
Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law
Centre for European Legal Studies weekly seminar series:
Centre for European Legal Studies Mackenzie-Stuart Lectures
But we’re far from the only ones. Check out the various Law programmes at other institutions both here in the UK and worldwide. Law firms many run their own seminar series as well. Register and sit in on some of the most cutting edge research, developments and thoughts in Law!
5. Court room visits in person or on demand/Livestreaming
One of the traditional pieces of advice to see what the law is like in action is to sit in a public gallery at your local courthouse and watch a few hours of proceedings. Now that restrictions are loosening worldwide, you’ll be able to attend in person again. So do head down to your local magistrate’s court and sit in the gallery for a while and see the law in action! Can’t make it in person? Several courts began to broadcast some of their proceedings online even before the pandemic in a bid to make the justice system more accessible. This includes the UK Supreme Court and Court of Appeals (Civil Division), and several district courts in the United States. The US channel C-SPAN (Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network) televises many proceedings of the United States federal government, including the Supreme Court and is available online. Select Canadian Supreme Court hearings are available via CPAC (Cable Public Affairs Channel), the Canadian C-SPAN counterpart.
And in many jurisdictions, access to the written decisions of the judges are available online and can be read by anyone. This includes the European Court of Justice, The UK Supreme Court, and the US Supreme Court.
6. Documentaries
Watching a documentary on a case or a particular issue is a great way to think about engaging with the law. Do bear in mind though that, as with any media source, that documentaries are highly curated pieces and do vary in their journalistic standards. So do keep your critical thinking caps on while watching them. As long as you are watching with a critical eye, they’re a wonderful way to explore certain aspects of law. Some legal documentaries that may be of interest include:
The 13th (2016)
Hot Coffee (2011)
Valentine Road (2013)
Indivisible (2017)
Capturing the Friedmans (2003)
Cleanflix (2009)
Central Park Five (2012)
Making a Murderer (2015)
Many are available online via Netflix or Amazon Prime or your local library may have them on DVD or Blu-Ray.
7. Blogs
Blogs are another resource you can use to develop your legal supercurriculars. Some blogs to take a look at are:
Equality and Human Rights Commission
Public Law for Everyone (by our very own Prof Mark Elliot)
The late Sir Henry Brooke’s blog
Leighday Law blog
Freshfields blogs
As you can see, blogs are hosted by academic organisations, think tanks, law firms, and individual legal scholars and lawyers alike. Try searching for blogs on the topics you are interested in — I’m sure something will come up. And if it doesn’t? Starting your own blog where you explore your legal interests is a great idea! It will also help you develop your writing and research skills which are essential to the study of law.
8. Social Media (yes, really)
It feels like everything and everyone has a social media presence — and this can be a benefit to those developing their supercurriculars. Law firms and student support networks such as Aspiring Solicitors use social media to promote events, webinars and seminars, mentorship programmes, workshops and the like. Instagram is really great for this. There are identity-specific accounts for BAME people, LGBTQ+ people, and women in law as well that will resonate with many aspiring law students. Twitter is a really common platform to engage with legal news and developments, especially among academic lawyers. For example, the controversial Internal Market Bill, and the risks it posed to breaking international law, caused a flurry of activity and discussion in the months preceeding the UK’s formal exit from the European Union. Following the debates, reading resources, and even venturing forth comments of you own are ways to start your exploration of aspects of the law further. You can follow the accounts of individual scholars and lawyers on Twitter and Instagram. Start your search with the name of a law firm or combining hashtags of things that may interest you and see what comes up. Follow stories to original posts to discover new accounts you may be interested in.
9. Subject taster sessions and summer schools
Many universities provide a wide variety of outreach activities that can help you deepen your curiously about law. Do check out what your closest university offers (assuming they offer Law as a course of study) but we’ll highligh some Cambridge-specific options here:
Cambridge Masterclasses — subject-specific events that offer high-achieving students in Year 12 (S5 for Scotland, Year 13 for NI, or equivalent) the chance to experience typical undergraduate teaching at the University of Cambridge, and to get a flavour of what it’s like to be a student here. The cost is usually £12.50 to cover operating costs (so it’s not-for-profit) but there are funded (i.e. free) places for students who meet certain widening participation criteria. We usually offer one or two Law Masterclasses a year.
Cambridge Sixth-Form Law Conference —founded over forty years ago, the Conference gives Year 12 students who may be interested in studying Law at degree level a balanced view of the Law, both as an academic subject and as a profession, and also to offer an insight into life as a Cambridge undergraduate. Applications typically open in the fall between October and December and the Conference runs over the course of about 4 days in late March/early April. Places are offered on a first-come-first-served basis so do get your application in early! Delegates do pay a fee to attend which covers their accommodation and food at-cost whilst they are in Cambridge (usually about £250 but this is subject to change in line with operating costs), but there are a number of places, usually around 50, that are funded for students who meet widening participation criteria.
Sutton Trust Summer Schools — students who meet the Sutton Trust’s eligibility criteria can attend a funded week-long residential summer school and get the full Cambridge student experience (including academic teaching and social life. It also provides you with information and advice to help you when it comes time to make your university applications.
On the subject of summer schools…you might hear of private programmes, some of which rent out Cambridge colleges as bases (colleges provide conference and event spaces outside of term which can be let by third-parties), and provide residential summer schools. They are often the first programmes that come up when you are looking for summer school opportunities online. These programmes are not affiliated with the University of Cambridge in any way, the University is not involved in teaching provision for them and does not vet the information they deliver. Furthermore, they are often prohibitively expensive for most applicants, costing thousands of pounds. If you have the financial ability and inclination to participate in these programmes you can of course do so. However, the general view of the University is that you do not, and indeed should not, spend large amounts of money in order to make a strong Cambridge application. That extends to admissions support consultancies as well; We do not support or encourage any of these commercial enterprises. None of these companies/individuals has access to any information that’s not already available free of charge to all schools, colleges and individual students from College admissions offices, the Cambridge Admissions Office or Cambridge Students’ Union. The whole purpose of this article is to provide you with accessible and affordable guidance!
10. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
MOOCS on platforms such as Coursera or FutureLearn might be a way to get a taste for the subject of law and its study, especially in an academic way. Many introductory law courses on these platform are free to take, or free to audit, and are offered by universities from around the world. The Middle Temple Library has a list of resources that might be of interest as well.
In fact, we have launched our own free online learning course (currently only offered a particular times during the year) which is designed to allow students aged 16–18 to figure out if studying Law at university is right for them. You can check our Exploring Law course on FutureLearn.
Some other courses that might interest you are:
A Law Student’s Toolkit (Yale University)
Introduction to English Common Law (University of London)
Introduction to American Law (University of Pennsylvania)
Law for Non-Lawyers (Monash University)
How to Become a Lawyer (University of Law)
The Modern Judiciary (King’s College London)
Chambers (Barrister) hosted on Forage
11. Work Experience (in person or virtual)
One way to explore your interest in Law is to do some job shadowing at a law firm. Work experience will often involve you shadowing a lawyer at a firm for a day to get an idea of what being a lawyer is like on a day-to-day basis. It’s a useful exercise for your to see if working in a firm or corporate setting suits you, but do note that as a secondary school student you won’t be getting your hands dirty with the fun legal work (that’s what university law students get to do on vacation schemes!). Rather, you’ll probably be fetching coffee, helping with some copying and a lot of listening. As such, we appreciate work experience as just that, an experience, but it isn’t a requirement to stand out on your applications. We know that most work experience is arranged through familial networks (although you can absolutely ‘cold call’ and reach out to a local firm yourself and ask about shadowing) and not every prospective law student has access to lawyers in their network. So if you can’t arrange work experience, don’t worry about it and focus on all the other opportunities you have.
That said, law firms and barrister chambers, acknowledging the COVID-19 pandemic’s limitations, started to provide virtual internships and work experience, many of which are free. Do have a look around LinkedIn, firm’s websites and social media accounts for opportunities, or set aside an afternoon for a ‘virtual work experience+Law’ Google rabbit hole, but here are a few to get you started:
Ready, Set, Law (Clifford Chance, one of our Access and Widening Participation Partners)
Virtual Experience Programme (Hogan Lovells, one of our Access and Widening Participation Partners)
Virtual Experience Programme (Linklaters)
12. Other Online Resources
The University of Cambridge’s HE Plus page on the study of Law and McBride’s Guides are other great useful resources for the aspiring law student to learn more about the subject. There is so much out there not only from the University of Cambridge, but many institutions across the UK and indeed the world. Here in the UK, Uni4me.com is a partnership of several universities who have pooled resources that may be helpful. The world is your oyster!
What are your favourite supercurricular activities in these unprecedented times? Let us know on Twitter or Instagram!
Editor’s Note:
11 March 2022 — this posted was updated to reflect a shift out of the COVID-19 pandemic in its prose and include more information about in-person opportunities.
22 June 2021 — this post was updated to include more information about MOOCs and virtual work experiences.
