As a student of the University of Sussex I thought I'd tell you about my opinions regarding the law course here because an open day can only tell you so much about the particular department.
Sussex is currently one or two places short of being one of the top 20 universities for law and it's grade requirements for law are now AAA-AAB. The Times university league table rated them as being the 8th best university for law but no other university league table ranks them as being quite so good for the subject. They generally emphasised the fact that they're trying to encourage more university league tables to recognise them as a top ten university during freshers week but I don't feel that they're doing enough to be a top ten university for the subject.
The top ten universities like Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, UCL, KCL, Nottingham, Durham, etc. will ask that you do preliminary reading before you get there, so that means that you should have you're text books before you get there, so that you can get on with work as soon as possible. Sussex does not take this attitude because they did not set us any preliminary reading and we didn't even know which text books we were supposed to have until the week after freshers week. To me this would be an obvious feature of the law degree to change if they want to be considered generally as a top ten university for this subject.
There are many cases of the university making us do exercises, where we spend too much time on the easier parts of a law degree. For example, for our first Frameworks of English Law Seminar all we had to do was a referencing exercise. I don't doubt that there are benefits of doing this exercise because it does take a while to get used to the referencing used in law but we could have covered more ground than the way in which cases/journals/etc. are referenced. What's more we did this seminar in the third week of the course, when we really could have done it in the first week of the course. I'm also not very happy with my (associate) tutor for this module because he sometimes doesn't get facts, which are written in the text book, right.
I was also not very impressed with the first public law seminar. The first exercise for it entailed the construction of a flow chart of the UK's constitutional power, followed by a second exercise of the purpose of constitutions and a third exercise where we defined the rule of law. Admittedly the work we do for seminars now is a bit harder but we still get questions, where the answers are pretty obvious, like "name 5-10 constitutional conventions". I was pushed harder for Politics AS level than I currently am for Public Law. I'm generally not happy with the staff in charge of this module because my public law lecturer for this term openly admitted to gaps in his knowledge and didn't like us to "ask [him] hard questions" and my seminar tutor's only knowledge of law comes from a conversion course. This meant that my seminar tutor was not able to answer the question of whether the fact that Parliament didn't convene on weekends was a convention. Furthermore, as soon as I read Jowell & Oliver's, The Changing Constitution, it became apparent to me that my lecturer had taken the majority of his information from there. My problem with the Public Law department is that we generally don't go into enough depth because it wasn't until I got home and started revising that I realised that we hadn't covered anything on the criticisms of Dicey's doctrine regarding the rule of law and the question of sovereignty regarding the constitutional acts, that have been brought in in the past few years.
I'm happy that my tutors and lecturers for Tort Law and Contract Law have enough knowledge of the subjects but I still have a few problems with these departments. My first two Contract Law seminars were about the conditions of offer and acceptance (if you haven't studied law this is the most basic condition for forming a legally binding contract), so we had less time to spend on more complicated parts of Contract Law like privity of contract (the idea that only the parties involved in the contract have the legal power to enforce the contract). My sister also disapproved of the text book we were recommended (Koffman and Macdonald) because it doesn't go into enough depth, so I have had to replace this with McKendrick. The text book (Markesinis) we were recommended for Tort Law is good. My criticisms of the Tort Law department would be that my first two lecturers were not great because although they're very intelligent they don't seem to like lecturing. The first lecturer was very monotonous and didn't engage us by asking questions and the next one was too intelligent for the job and so he would spend too much time illustrating his points and go off on a tangent to the point where he'd get through an average of three power point slides per lecture.
I had two other offers from Essex and Exeter and I don't regret choosing Sussex over these two universities but I really wish I was at a better university like UCL, etc. You can read my reasons for choosing Sussex over these two universities on the blog I wrote about having a gap year.
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