Okay, well good morning everybody, it’s a great pleasure to welcome you to the Faculty of Law
here at Cambridge today. My name is Mark Elliott, I’m Professor of Public Law here in the faculty
and also Chair of the Faculty of Law. You’re going to hear a lot today about our course, about what
studying law is like, about what studying law here, in particular, is like. I’m not going to
repeat or anticipate the things that my colleagues I’m sure will tell you as the morning progresses.
I thought instead that I would just share with you I think three things that stand out to me
that make the Faculty of Law here special, and I speak as somebody who has been here for a long
time and indeed came here as a student myself so I’ve seen it from, I think, from your perspective
as well as from the one that I have now. I think the first thing that stands out to me
is that we offer, I think, genuinely outstanding teaching; the educational experience that we offer
here is almost unique. I say “almost” because there’s a university a few miles to the west which
does things in kind of a similar way but we do do things in a very unique and different way here.
Our small group teaching, which you’ll hear more about later on today, does give you a very
different kind of educational experience compared to what you might find elsewhere. It’s also the
case that our teaching here is research-led and that means you will be taught by people
who are world-leading experts in their fields, and we think that that makes a great difference
to what our undergraduate students actually get out of the undergraduate programme.
The second thing that I think makes the law programme here special and valuable
is that contrary to what you might expect, we aren’t just going to teach you a whole bunch of
rules. You will learn a lot of rules if you study law here or somewhere else,
but that’s not really what it’s all about. What it’s really about is getting behind and underneath
those rules and thinking about why is the law like this, where did these rules come from,
how does this fit into the way that our society is organised, what does it mean
to live in a rule of law based democracy and what is the special function of law
and lawyers in contributing to that kind of society? Questions that no doubt
are on all of our minds at the moment given the illegal war that’s taking place in Ukraine and
closer to home, the vote in the House of Commons last night by the British House of Commons to
breach international law in relation to Northern Ireland; what is the role of law and lawyers in
relation to these kinds of questions? In our programme we seek to equip you with
the critical, the analytical skills as well as knowledge to make a contribution to society,
not simply as a legal practitioner but in a much broader sense. Then, thirdly and finally,
we aim to be a welcoming and inclusive faculty. We’re committed to ensuring that the amazing
legal education that we offer here in one of the world’s best law schools is open to
all talented students irrespective of their school background, their social background,
their financial circumstances or whatever else it might be. I feel very passionately about that
having come to Cambridge from a working-class background and having been the first generation
in my family to study anything at university and we’re very committed to that as a faculty
and you’ll hear more this morning, I’m sure, about our work in that area.
So, I hope that you find this morning useful, I hope you get your questions answered and I hope
that you will leave today with a clearer sense of what we’re about here and whether or not this is
somewhere that you would like to apply to. So, to hear more about what we’re doing, I’m going
to hand over now to Felix Steffek, who is the director of our undergraduate law programme.