Student red-top The Tab sent its fashion correspondent, Megan Kemp, along to Oxford University Law Society's recent "President's Drinks". Encouragingly for the future of the legal profession – which has traditionally struggled with sartorial elegance – Kemp liked what she saw...
While the decision to jail Trenton Oldfield has been greeted with shock – the New Statesman went as far as to describe the case as “our Pussy Riot” – there has also been amusement at the anti-elitism protester's rather elite background.
Oldfield attended one of Australia’s most highly-regarded fee-paying schools, before obtaining a masters degree at the London School of Economics and becoming a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
It seems that this taste for establishment excellence may have influenced Oldfield's choice of lawyers...
In May, 4 New Square chambers opted not to sack one its pupils, Henry Mostyn, after he was caught by police with cocaine and ecstasy while queuing outside a Shoreditch nightclub.
Some admired 4 New Square's liberalism. Others questioned whether Mostyn had been made a special case of by virtue of his high profile father, High Court judge Sir Nicholas Mostyn QC.
Meanwhile, there were murmurings that Mostyn had merely been given a stay of execution and that 4 New Square was not planning to keep him on when he finished his pupillage in the summer.
Well, those murmurings proved right...
Three weeks on from the scrapping of the trainee minimum wage and the decision looks more ill-thought through than ever, argues Oxford University Bachelor of Civil Laws (BCL) student Richard Ridyard
The thousands of LPC graduates without a training contract have choked off the arteries of confidence in the legal graduate market. We find ourselves at a crossroads. The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has made a bold step by abolishing the minimum wage for trainee solicitors. But now that the dust has settled and we have had a chance to reflect on that decision, was it the right one? Here, I argue that the four reasons Legal Cheek gave to explain why the SRA acted as it did are flawed.
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Training contract numbers may be on the increase again, but times are still hard for LPC students – thousands of whom will finish law school this summer without a job to go to.
How to steal a march on the rest of the wannabes? Well, you could take out an advert hawking your services in a legal magazine. That's what Charles Mallinson, an Oxford University graduate currently studying the LPC, has done, placing a come-and-get-me plea to the corporate and commercial law firms of the North West in the latest issue of Liverpool Law Society’s magazine (see below).
Nice idea, you might think. But the trouble with this sort of thing is that it can get you in hot water with law's regulators – as Bar graduate Maney Ullah found out in January 2009 when he placed this full page ad in the inside cover of Counsel magazine.
"Radical; vegetarian; socialist. These three words are rarely used in conjunction with lawyers, but these are the three that encapsulate Michael Mansfield QC," begins last week's Oxford University student newspaper profile of well-known human rights lawyer Michael Mansfield (pictured left).
"In a mystifying world, brim-full of traditions, wigs, and lots of Latin," it continues, "you can imagine the excitement I felt when I was told that I would be having dinner with a Queen’s Counsel. And not just any QC, but the Johnny Depp (pictured right) of the legal world."
Michael Mansfield: the Johnny Depp of the legal world? Really?
A state-school pupil who was invited to Oxford University for an interview for a place to read law decided against going along – and wrote her own letter of rejection to the university. In it, she said Oxford “did not quite meet the standard" of other universities.
Here’s the full text of Elly Nowell’s (pictured) letter.
Dear University,
I have now considered your establishment as a place to read Law (Jurisprudence). I very much regret to inform you that I will be withdrawing my application...
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