Faculty of Law, University of Oxford
The Faculty of Law, Oxford is the law school of the University of Oxford which has a history of over 800 years of teaching and writing law.[1] It is unique in its use of personalised tutorials, in which students are taught by faculty fellows in groups of one to three on a weekly basis,[2] as the main form of instruction in its undergraduate and graduate courses. It offers the largest doctoral programme in Law in the English-speaking world.[3]
Contents
History
There were faculties of Civil Law and Canon Law in the medieval University. During the Reformation, Henry VIII prohibited the teaching of Canon Law, instead founding the Regius Chair of Civil Law, one of the oldest Professorships at the University of Oxford. From then until the 19th century, the University awarded the Bachelor of Civil Law and the Doctor of Civil Law, through the Faculty of Civil Law.
William Blackstone, a graduate of Pembroke College, Oxford and subsequently a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, was appointed the inaugural Vinerian Professor of English Law in 1758, and was the first professor at any university to teach the common law. His lectures formed the basis for his Commentaries on the Laws of England, a definitive source of and case for the study of the English common law.[4][5][6]
It was not until the 1870s that Oxford offered a degree in English law, the BA in Jurisprudence. Not long after, Cornelia Sorabji was the first woman to read Law at Oxford in 1889.[7][8] In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were prominent professors in Oxford such as Frederick Pollock, William Anson, and Albert Dicey. The emergence of a large community of legal scholars in twenty-five men's colleges can be dated from the 1920s and 1930s, but the development was consolidated in the 1950s and 1960s, when Law Fellowships also became common in the women's colleges.[tone] The Oxford law school flourished through the operation of the resulting internal market, and through the brilliance of particular leading scholars such as H. L. A. Hart, Rupert Cross, Tony Honoré, John Morris, Peter Carter, and others.[9]
In the twentieth century, the BCL became a master's level degree; and, by the 1970s, Oxford developed a large graduate programme in law. It has been claimed that the BCL at Oxford is "the most highly regarded taught masters-level qualification in the common law world".[10] The DPhil in Law, which dates to the 1910s, became popular at that time particularly in international law, comparative law, and philosophy of law; after the 1970s, the areas of research pursued in the doctoral programme broadened to make it a general training ground for legal academics. In 2010 the MSc in Law and Finance (MLF) was introduced and is taught jointly by the Faculty of Law and the Saïd Business School. The MLF programme involves a combination of finance and economic courses combined with BCL law courses.[11] Like the BCL taught at Oxford, entry into the MLF is highly competitive with on average less than fifteen per cent of applicants being accepted.
Academics
Research centres
The Faculty has a number of research centres:
- Centre for Competition Law and Policy
- Centre for Criminology
- Centre for Socio-Legal Studies
- Institute of European and Comparative Law
- Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre
- Oxford Transitional Justice Research
- Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy
Oxford Pro Bono Publico (OPBP)
The Oxford Pro Bono Publico (OPBP) is an organisation consisting of graduate law students and members of faculty to provide high-quality comparative law research, gratis, for lawyers acting pro bono around the world as well as promoting pro bono law in general.[12]
Facilities
St Cross Building
The Law Faculty offices are situated in the St Cross Building, which is a Grade II listed building, designed by the late Sir John Leslie Martin (architect of the Royal Festival Hall in London) and Colin St John Wilson (architect of the New British Library). The St Cross Building is also home to the Bodleian Law Library.[13]
Bodleian Law Library
The Bodleian Law Library was opened in 1964 and holds over 450,000 volumes. It is a Legal Deposit Library, allowing it to claim a copy of any printed legal material published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. It is also an official Documentation Centre for the European Union.[14]
Notable individuals
Notable alumni
The following notable individuals have read law at the Faculty of Law, Oxford.
Judiciary
- International Court of Justice
- Sir Humphrey Waldock
- European Court of Human Rights
- Sir Nicolas Bratza, President of the European Court of Human Rights (2011–2012)
- Paul Mahoney
- Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales
- Rayner Goddard, Baron Goddard (1946–1958)
- Peter Taylor, Baron Taylor of Gosforth (1992–1996)
- Supreme Court of the United Kingdom
- Lords of Appeal in Ordinary
- Keeper or Master of the Rolls and Records of the Chancery of England
- Alfred Denning, Baron Denning (19 April 1962 – 29 September 1982)
- Court of Appeal of England and Wales
- Sir Brian Leveson, current President of the Queen's Bench Division
- Sir Michael Fox
- Sir Bernard Rix
- High Court of Justice
- Sir Robert Jay, counsel to the Leveson Inquiry
- Constitutional Court of South Africa
- High Court of Australia
- Supreme Court of Canada
- Supreme Court of New Zealand
- Supreme Court of the United States
- John Marshall Harlan II
- David Souter
- Byron White (Rhodes Scholar; did not graduate)
- Federal Court of Australia
- Supreme Court of South Australia
- John Doyle, Chief Justice (1995–2012)
- Supreme Court of Western Australia
- David Malcolm, Chief Justice (1988–2006)
- Andrew Beech
- James Edelman, youngest person to be appointed as a Justice of the Supreme Court of Western Australia
- Carmel McLure
Legal
- Director of Public Prosecutions (England and Wales)
- Sir Thomas Hetherington QC (1977–1987)
- Dame Barbara Mills QC (1992–1998)
- Sir Keir Starmer QC (2008–2013)
- Solicitor-General of Australia
- Human rights
- Academia
- Andrew Ashworth
- Henry Angus
- Peter Birks
- Sir William Blackstone KC
- Sir Ian Brownlie
- Peter Cane
- Simon Chesterman
- Hugh Collins
- James Crawford SC
- Sir Rupert Cross
- A. V. Dicey
- Ronald Dworkin
- John Eekelaar
- Timothy Endicott
- John Finnis
- Bernard Gardiner, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford (1712–1715)
- John Gardner
- Sir William Searle Holdsworth
- Sir Neil MacCormick
- Joseph Raz
- Ben Saul
- Jane Stapleton
- Graham Virgo
- Jeremy Waldron
- Wil Waluchow
- Ivy Williams
Politics
- Heads of state
- Olav V of Norway, King of Norway
- Vajiravudh, King of Siam (did not graduate)
- Wasim Sajjad, President of Pakistan
- Heads of government
- Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1997–2007)
- John Turner, Prime Minister of Canada (1984–1984)
- Liaquat Ali Khan, Prime Minister of Pakistan (1947–1951)
- Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Prime Minister of Pakistan (1956–1957)
- Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Prime Minister of Pakistan (1973–1977)
- Seni Pramoj, Prime Minister of Thailand (1945-1946)
- Governor-General of Australia
- Attorney-General for Australia
- Peter Durack (1977–1983)
- Daryl Williams (1996–2003)
- George Brandis (2013–present)
- Other politicians
Other
- Journalism
- Business
- Allan Myers QC, Australia's wealthiest barrister[15]
- Other
Notable academics
The following notable individuals are or have been academics of the Faculty of Law, Oxford.
- Chichele Professor of Public International Law
- Ian Brownlie
- Vaughan Lowe
- Humphrey Waldock, Judge of the International Court of Justice
- Family Law
- Professor of Jurisprudence
- Other jurisprudence scholars
- Timothy Endicott, Professor of Legal Philosophy and Dean of the Faculty of Law
- John Finnis, Professor of Law
- Leslie Green, Professor of the Philosophy of Law
- Tony Honoré, Emeritus Regius Professor of Civil Law (Oxford)
- Joseph Raz, Professor of the Philosophy of Law
- Jeremy Waldron, current Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory
- Peter Cane, former Professor of Law and current Distinguished Professor at the Australian National University
- Vinerian Professor of English Law
- Sir William Blackstone (1758–1766)
- Sir Robert Chambers (1766–1777)
- Richard Wooddeson (1777–1793)
- James Blackstone (1793–1824)
- Philip Williams (1824–1843)
- John Robert Kenyon (1844–1880)
- Albert Venn Dicey (1882–1909)
- William Martin Geldart (1909–1922)
- William Searle Holdsworth (1922–1944)
- Geoffrey Chevalier Cheshire (1944–1949)
- Harold Greville Hanbury (1949–1964)
- Sir Rupert Cross (1964–1979)
- Andrew Ashworth (1997–2012)
- Hugh Collins (2012–present)
References
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