There were basically two main points that convinced me to come to Kent (although now that I am here I would add several more – but those are for other future blog posts). Maybe you have reached this blog because you are a student at Kent University so you will know what I am talking about, and in case you are a prospect applicant I am sure you will be interested in these things, as they will be present in your student life at Kent if you finally decide to come.
I had the excellent opportunity of studying a Double Degree in Law and Political Science in one of the best universities in my home country (Spain). But I wasn’t really interested in becoming a lawyer (cultural difference: we don’t have the distinction between solicitors and barristers!) so when I was in my last year I started looking for possible LLMs in the areas I liked. I was sure that I wanted to study it in United Kingdom – mainly for the European approach as well as the language, so the search started and one not so special day, I found the Kent LLM website…
My first main reason to come to Kent was the streams available at the LLM. I am doing International Law with International Relations. Multidisciplinary studies as these one aren’t available at many universities and especially if we want them to be top Universities (Kent University ranked 10th in the UK in The Times Good University Guide 2014 last year).
With the stream I chose (IL and IR) I am able to study not only modules from the School of Law but also two modules from the School of Politics. Law is extremely related to politics, so this option gives me the possibility of getting a good quality specialization in order to develop the international career I want without losing a comprehensive point of view.
The second main reason was Kent’s critical approach (you can read about it here). Coming from a strictly black letter University (as, in my opinion, it is usual in civil law systems), this has been a huge and truly positive change. So this past Thursday I went to the Introduction to the Kent Critical Law Society and the ‘Critical Law School’. In case you don’t know what a society is (I didn’t know it before coming to Kent), they are organizations run by students to practice a certain hobby, cause or to promote personal and professional development. Here you have the societies at Kent.
At the KCLS open forum, we had the great opportunity of listening to Professor William White. He tried to explain us (mostly first year students at Kent) what it means to be a critical Law School and why it is important to be so.
The general idea that I would try to summarize is that Kent tries (and for what I’ve seen in these weeks they work really hard in order to achieve it) that you think. There will be no more learning by heart regulations and rules in the LLM (we don’t even have exams, only essays). They want you to think what the law says, why it says so, what the implications are and, at the end, they want you to think if this is how it should be.
A critical approach like the one you can get if you come to study at Kent is a fantastic opportunity to get knowledge in a specific area, to think about the issues there and finally to wonder, is that how I/we would like it to be? Probably this is the correct approach in order to – at least slightly – change the problems in our legal systems.
I have only been here three weeks and in the next months I will be able to see fully how this idea is developed but for the moment I can promise you that they are making me think about law, society and politics.
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