International Commercial Arbitration

By LLM85 in LLM85 KCL on Nov 05, 2009

Ok so I guess now that I dealt with the admin stuff, i should go into the actual substance of the course and I will start with International Commercial Arbitration merely because it is my favourite module.

The structure of this module is all over the place, we range from having 1 lecturer in a 2 hour lecture to having 3 with an assistant as well. All three of them seem to have different views of the topic and they disagree all the time...its fantastic.

Have you ever been in a lecture where the lecturer is saying the exact same thing that you read in the text book written by him/her (which also just happens to be the recommended text for the course, what a coincidence ?), all you ever get is one view of the subject. This helps no one and just doesn't mirror the reality of the legal scene. Not this module.

Anyway this module is just so interesting and it really sounds like something I would love to do as a career but and there always seems to be a 'but' with law, this is a profession that seems very hard to get into and i keep hearing what seems to be turning into everybody's mantra 'it's really competitive'.

But that does not detract from the actual substance of the module, to be fair there is a lot and i mean A LOT of reading that you have to do by yourself and we never finish covering what we are supposed to in class but hey this is masters right, just suck it up and move on. I do have to make a special mention though, Toby Landau who sort of heads the course this semester is awesome, he really makes you analyse what he is teaching you both theoretically and practically.

Which brings me to one final point that i have about the LLM course at King's in general, as much as i moan and whinge about it one thing that i appreciate above all is that all the lecturers approach the modules from a practical realistic angle. So they will teach you all the heavy theory but then they will qualify it by saying something like you do need to know the theory but in modern practice nobody really refers to this anymore. As far as i am concerned anything that makes my course more relevant works for me.