Good day, Goeiedag, welcome, wamkelekile. My name is Dr Bradley Greenhalgh. I am the
student coordinator in the Dean’s Office at the faculty of law at Stellenbosch University
and in this presentation, we are going to be talking about
What can I do with my law degree?
And this overview that we are going to be providing is going to be focusing on
your future, what the thinking of a jurist entails and then obviously career options.
Now usually, students, or prospective students when they come to Open Day are very interested in
the nuts and bolts of what’s going on when they’re actually at university.
And if you want that information about the different programmes, please watch the other presentations
and you will get all of that information there and you can also consult the various online resources.
The university is very good at providing those online resources. But what I’m going to be talking
about, and this is usually a live session so we’re going to have far more pictures in this session, is what’s next?
What happens after you’ve actually done a law degree and why should you do one in the first place?
So hopefully we’re going to answer all of those questions.
Alright so, first we’re going to be looking obviously at your future.
To sketch a little bit of a path here, you are going to come and join us here at the Faculty of Law.
You’re going to choose the law programme that you are going to take
then you are going to graduate and you’re going to be incredibly proud, as you should be.
Your parents and loved ones are going to be incredibly proud.
And you are then going to start wondering okay but is there a return on investment?
What am I going to actually get from this choice that I have made?
But it’s not necessarily only about financial rewards.
Many of you are here for these reasons, for wanting to speak for those who have no voice or
have no agency and you want to make a meaningful
difference in your community or your society or your country or the world as a whole.
And maybe some of you have very personal reasons in your own family situations for why you are here.
But ultimately what you are going to end up as is going to be this future jurist.
Maybe you’re going to be in the business world, NGOs, a lawyer, an advocate, a winemaker, a mechanic, doesn’t really matter.
But what are you going to get should you have chosen law?
What does that actually entail? What is going to change you? Why should you be doing law?
And in this regard, we really have to start with what it means to be thinking like a jurist.
And we use the word jurist because it involves that of the law but it’s not limiting your
future options by saying like a lawyer or like an advocate. We use the word jurist on purpose
because one of our focuses is and one of the outcomes
if you put in the effort and the necessary focus when you are a student is that you are going to
fundamentally change your way of thinking. Now some of you might be aware of this thing
called artificial intelligence and the stultifying effects or the shift and change up that is taking
place across the world in terms of algorithmic processing of the law and computational law and the like.
And we can only assure you that we are aware of this and we don’t exist in a bubble and
you will be exposed to law and technology modules. But there are always people involved in facets of the law.
So yes, there are certain spheres of the law that are going to be open to significant
changes as a result of computers, algorithms, AI, deep science, deep learning, deep data.
But you are potentially going to enter into a field that is going to be changing rapidly
over the next decade or so, or two decades, three decades and what an exciting time to be involved
in an industry where you could potentially play a hand in shaping where things go.
But the bottom line is when many of you think about what different degree programmes involve.
I mean here we’ve got a musician, a doctor, engineers but you could add any other examples here.
Scientists, commerce world, what you might expect happens at university and does in many
of these programmes is that there is a focus on the practicality of those degrees.
If you study a music degree, you are actually playing your instrument.
If you do engineering, you are doing projects out there are actually doing the things that an engineer would do.
Similarly, a doctor is a consulting with patients as they make their way through their degree programmes.
They are working on cadavers and the likes. There is obviously an element of
practicality and practical tuition involved and such is the case with law.
You will be exposed to the world renowned and certainly nationally renowned law clinic here
at Stellenbosch University and the brilliant work they’ve been doing.
You’ll get exposure to what it means to engage with clients and to do the day-to-day practice and within your different modules and
things, you will also be exposed to what the impact is.
What happens when the law actually touches the community out there and interacts with the world around us.
You will be exposed to that.
What you won’t necessarily be exposed to, apart from different legal skill modules and the like,
is things that you might expect to be shown from a practical perspective.
How to think like a jurist, how to find loopholes, how to argue, how to stand up and convey
your thoughts in structured and logical way. Now, there are opportunities to do that.
There are many moot courts which are like mock trials, fake trial opportunities.
We’ve got brilliant facilities at the Faculty where you can participate in
those moot courts and that will certainly hone those sides of things.
But what I actually want to tell you is that many students when they come into law,
have got this mental model in their mind.
I think that’s a parrot. I’m not sure but I’m going to claim it as being a parrot.
They think that basically what you might have to do is just come in and learn a lot of information
and a lot of data from these dusty bookshelves or increasingly online.
Get all of that into your head, and then regurgitate that and then you are a lawyer.
Now, I’m not going to be pretend there’s not going to be a lot of memorization in certain
parts of your modules. But what I am wanting to convey to you is that what you are going to taught
are the theory and the law and the detail within different areas of the law and you are going to
be exposed to cases which are the actual printed version of cases that have been heard before our judges.
And journal articles where academics write about those judgements.
Legislation, textbooks and the like. You’re going to be doing a lot of reading.
But it is in that process of listening to lecturers explain things,
you yourself doing the reading, of working out how to synthesis the essence of what is being said in a law case.
And how to combine that with the information being given in your lectures.
It is through all of those processes that start acquiring the skills
that are fundamentally going to change the way that you think and interact with the world around you.
This is what we are trying to emphasise here is that you can come in and do this law degree,
but it is only you that can decide whether or not you want to get an education,
and the biggest benefit you can get as studying as a law student is captured in this single word Change.
You will fundamentally change the way that you think and engage with the world around
and that is what is going to set apart from any another graduate in any other programme.
That is what makes it so exciting.
It’s not just the theory and the how of the law that you will know and be exposed to
but you have learnt an entirely new language.
You have pulled your way of thinking out of its comfort zone and whatever it had when it came into university and
you have fundamentally shifted it into a different zone, a different way of looking at things.
If you choose to go that route.
If you choose to be educated in what it means to think like a jurist.
Right, so. With those points being made, Let us look at our different career options.
Now obviously one would think that when you are learning a professional degree programme such as
what law is, you would have your standard sort of degree choices or career choices and you certainly do.
I think most people associate lawyers or advocates with appearing before the courts
as litigators where they argue in front of different courts.
We’ve got the Constitutional Court there, the Supreme Court of Appeal and yes that certainly does happen.
But the reality is sometimes far less attractive.
That slide that we’ll show you in a moment again is the inside of a clerk’s room.
I think it was Somerset West or possibly Strand. And each one of those files
is a case that involves people, there’s a story behind it. But suffice it say if we look again
at that, there is a lot of paperwork involved with being an attorney for example or advocate
and you will become incredibly comfortable with absorbing massive amounts of information and very
quickly synthesising, distilling what is so important from those massive amounts of data.
Again a very valuable skill to be had. But of course, there’s the flipside of it.
There’s the commercial side of things. Again it doesn’t necessarily depend on what you’ve studied.
There are many examples of students who have studied a four-year LLB or a BA law who go on to be heavily
or exclusively involved in commercial law. But obviously if you are doing a BCom law or BAccLLB,
there’s a much more solid ground in terms of commerce. But yes you can go and work in these
massive commercial law firms or at any number of companies.
You can be an in-house advisor and the like.
It really does depend on what you want to make, do with your opportunities.
It would also be remiss of us not to point that there is frequently a correlation between what you
do as a background degree programme and what could potentially become of you in terms of wealth.
All of these logos that you see here, some of those companies are alumni of our own faculty.
They have got a background in law. The Business Insider article from 2020, it’s been repeated again
in 2021 as it has been for the last several years.
That statistic remains more or less the same, that dollar millionaires, almost 30% of them have studied law.
Now this is not to suggest that by mere virtue or the fact that you do a law degree you are going to
make massive amounts of money because many of those individuals that go into the typical degree
or career will be selling their time. But what we are suggesting, is again, if you want to, if you
educate yourself into seeing those opportunities, if you utilise the way that you think differently,
you as a future law student and law graduate are potentially going to see opportunities and
see companies and where they are going long before someone else who studied
a different programme might so those opportunities are undoubtedly there.
And of course, the flipside to that, it doesn’t necessarily always have to be focused on those commercial viabilities.
You also have opportunities here to make a difference within the broader community.
Environmental work, The United Nations, all number of NGOs.
Parliament is of course an option in terms of a future in politics.
All of these different NGOs have made meaningful changes and differences
in the context of our country and I’ve already alluded to
the fact earlier, our law clinic is playing no small part in this as well.
But what about postgraduate when you are finished with your various law degrees?
Well you have those options to then go study further. Overseas we’ve got increasing relationships with
any number of international universities, some of the best universities in the world.
And I cannot emphasise this enough, this is just a small sample of some of the partnerships that
we have with continental Europe, Africa and we are branching increasingly into America,
it is hoped in the very near future.
To the extent that the Law Faculty, it’s not a large faculty, it’s a medium sized faculty
but we’ve recently created a new position of Vice-Dean for internationalization and research
which again is evidence of how serious we are taking
our increasing ability for our students to engage and study overseas with partner universities.
Now after that, what about international options? We are always asked whether or not you can go
study overseas with a law degree and the answer is Most definitely yes. You can study further.
It is not at all an impediment if you qualified in South Africa with a law degree but it is going to depend
on what the different jurisdictions have as requirements for people who have qualified elsewhere.
In exactly the same way that a law student that graduate in England or Germany or
Australia or America, if they wanted to come to South Africa and practice here, there would be
a requirement, an understandable one, that they did some form of a conversion course
to become familiar with what the law is in South Africa before they are able to practice it here.
And the same would apply to you as a law student from South Africa if you wanted to go and practice overseas.
It’s just how it works because whilst you have been taught to think like a jurist, and
I cannot emphasise this enough, that is incredibly powerful, you still need to become familiar with
the individual law systems and approaches that are applicable in those different countries. So does
it disqualify you by virtue of the fact that you have studied and graduated with a law degree in South Africa?
Absolutely not. You just need to find out what your requirements are, depending
on where you want to go further and we have got countless, countless examples of very successful
alumni that are overseas and are practising in different countries
ranging from Australia, Continental Europe, again the Americas and the far East.
So, it really isn’t an impediment it just depends where you are interested in going and what you’re wanting to do there.
Right, so. To conclude with this flurry of information
I want to end off with this remark by Jeremy Bentham “power of the [jurist] lies in the uncertainty of the law.”
We had a very prominent entrepreneur of ours that studied
at Stellenbosch University at the law faculty that came back and was chatting some of our
mercantile law students and one of the students asked him what was the single biggest skill or
what he was most appreciative of having acquired as a law student and he said something remarkably similar.
He said he learnt to be comfortable with the uncertainty. In many other degree programmes
there’s this notion, given their field that things are either black or white, blue or red, right or wrong.
As a jurist, as a law student, you fast learn that that is not the case.
That everything in our world is open to interpretation and it depends on how you look at it,
and it depends on which details are available and it depends on how you utilise that information.
There is uncertainty all over the place but importantly we as law students are comfortable with that fact.
This is what separates you from so many others along with what we had said earlier about how you think potentially,
as a jurist that is what opens up all of those possibilities when you are finished studying as a law student.
Particularly at this very good faculty. Stellenbosch University’s Faculty.
So with that being said, I just want to point you again for further information
You can go look at those websites, maties.com, forward slash law is where you’ll find
the faculty’s website and of course calendar is where you’ll find access to the
various yearbooks of the different faculties.
I want to thank you for spending time with me here today.
I hope that you’ve been enthused about the possibilities should you choose
to go in the direction of law and if everything plans out the way that we hope it will,
I look forward to seeing you someday on campus.
Thank you very much, enkosi, baie dankie, goodbye.