Final timetable II

Constitutional - Const. / Contract - Contr. / International - I / Land - L / Supervision (i.e. not a lecture) - S / Tort - T / Week One or Two - W1/2

Monday
9am: Const., 12pm: T, 3pm: IS (W2)
Tuesday
9am: I, 10am: Contr., 12pm: T, 5pm: TS (W2)
Wednesday
9am: L, 10am: I, 11am: Const., 3pm: Contr. (W2), 5pm: L (W1)
Thursday
9am: L, 10am: Const., 12pm: Contr., 3pm: Const. (W2)
Friday
10am: Contr., 11am: T, 12pm: L

To explain the Week One and Two part, similar to other universities, Cambridge operates on a numbered weekly system (although different in that their terms only last eight weeks), beginning with one on the first Thursday of the academic term and finishing with eight on the final Friday (more information about Cambridge terms can be found here).

Supervisions alternate on either odd or even weeks; at the minute I've got four supervisions in one, and one in the other, which isn't the ideal arrangement, and hopefully I can change Tort over in Week three, so I'll have work for a fortnight, but then things can even themselves out.

I'll be in a group of anything from two to four for these, and normally have to travel all over the place as the people teaching are spread between four colleges (including my own). My lectures 'officially' start tomorrow, but I've been on the go the past couple of days arranging appointments with the supervisors for the supervisions, and we've already been set quite a bit of work; something which is pretty daunting when you have a grand total of no legal knowledge at present!

I'll try and post later regarding what I've learnt about books.

Final timetable

At the minute my timetable is looking (reasonably) spacious, I have lectures from 9am to 12pm most days, aside from Thursday where I get to get up at 10, and then supervisions Mondays through to Wednesdays at 3pm or later. I've been to two of the three introductory lectures that were held in the first week, as the last one clashed with some events that were going on in my college, but I plan to go to the repeat series next weekend.

I'll post the final draft of my timetable when I've confirmed all my supervisions; at the minute I've only seen my supervisors for International, Tort and Constitutional, which leaves Land and Contract. I'm seeing these last two to arrange appointments on Tuesday and Wednesday.

It also looks as if I'll have to write an essay for each of these classes once every two weeks, probably no longer than 2000 or so words. Encouragingly, they seem to be keen for me to use my own intuition and thought quite a lot, which is a huge change from my previous degree, where the standard of excellence was a wide variety of quotes and references!

Oh, I should also mention that all those classes (aside from International) are mandatory modules, but there is actually one selective module of the first year of the Affiliated course; a choice between that and Civil Law. I'll also post more about books and other things soon.

Introductory Timetable

We finally have the timetables for the introductory lectures! They run from 9.00am to 12.30pm each day. Here are the topics that are going to be covered:

Thursday 2 October
Introduction to Cambridge and the Law Faculty
Practical issues: from safety to communications
Introduction to Law and Sources of Law
Structure of the Courts

Friday 3 October
Legal Institutions
Reading a Case
Introduction to Legal Information Technology

Saturday 4 October
Reading a Statute
Judicial Reasoning in Relation to Cases and Statutes
Studying Law

Three Day Introductory Course

Another affiliated student (not at my college) and I have known for a while about this three day course that all affiliates, and those transferring into law from another subject have to take. However, we only recently found out (of our own volition) when this is supposed to run, the dates being from the 2nd to the 4th of October.

I was concerned by this; firstly, by the fact that I had already contacted my college to ask whether I could arrive earlier and been told it would not be possible, and secondly, that my college's induction day would fall in the middle of the three days!

However, my college has not only now said I can come earlier (30th of September) but rearranged their induction day for BA(Aff) Law students to fall on the 1st of October, so that it will no longer interfere with the course, which is great. The only thing I'm slightly worried about now is that my parents won't be around on the 1st, so I hope we can get any necessary paperwork out of the way on the 30th.