I am American and got my JD in the US. I am seriously considering getting an LLM in the UK. What are UK LLM Classes like? Is it the Socratic method similar to US law schools? Is it just as rigorous? I would like to have an idea of what I should expect. Thanks.

It sort of depends on the instructor and to a lesser degree on the program. My experience was that it was not at all like U.S. law school. The Socratic method - as you probably know it - was not used. You were not cold called. Some instructors liked to ask questions rather than simply lecture so you could record notes. Others preferred not to deal with the students much at all and didn't engage them. They just sort of worked their way through the material. In either case, you had WAY more reading than you could reasonably accomplish - and, yes, that's in comparison to U.S. law schools which already assign quite a lot. You're buried under mountains of reading, which you have to obtain yourself from various sources in the university library and on-line. You're a massively busy secretary for weeks until you figure out it's not worth it.

I've said it before, and I will say it again: The first thing you need to do after you've decided which courses you want to take is to find out what the exam is going to be like (if you have one for that course). I didn't have any courses with set exams, which is to say that the courses provided a set of questions, but you were only required to answer a select few from the possibilities given. In addition, again in my experience, you didn't get questions with all possible legal issues incorporated. The questions tended to deal with one discrete area of the course, and other questions dealt with other areas. The combination of those two factors meant that you could really just study the most important parts of the course in preparation for the exam, and if you omitted Islamic finance or something, you could be fairly sure you wouldn't find yourself in the position of having that kind of issue incorporated as a sub-issue in a question you absolutely had to answer. That's a long explanation; but it is to say that there are good ways and bad of dealing with LL.M. courses. The reading load is FAR in excess of the expectation at American law schools, but it affects what instructors reasonably expect from students (whether they admit it or not), the lecture format, the exam format and, really, your approach. The LL.M. (and obviously I only have the benefit of one perspective from one program) is just a different creature compared to law school, and . . . It's like this: if you have ever tried to understand cricket, it's not that difficult. But if you try to figure it out because it looks like baseball, then you're probably making the task harder than it has to be.

P_Martini has given a very good answer here.

To add... the teaching structure of an LLM is generally based on the structure of the English LLB degree i.e., lectures and seminars (exc. Oxbridge that use a tutorial system). Lectures are very much a passive experience: mostly you take notes and follow a handout. Then you go away and work through the reading from that lecture (some lecturers will give the handout a week before so you can read before the lecture, but many don't). As said above, you often get huge amounts of reading, so you have to become quite savvy about what parts of the course will be found in the exam.

It's important to pick modules with good lecturers otherwise the module becomes purely self-study (you may as well be doing it as a distance course).

For seminars, you'll have a list of questions/scenarios and prepare answers (usually exam qu's), which are then discussed in the seminar. Not all LLM programmes run seminars. Seminars are probably the most useful aspect of the teaching experience as they offer a chance for you to engage with the lecturer/prof, and ask for clarification on points etc.

Its much less Socratic - but it will depend heavily on the size of the class. In a class of less than 20 (sometimes even less than 10) it will be Socratic by default.

So from what I'm getting, it's a lot more similar to say if you took Poly Sci as an undergrad where you were given lots of readings and the important stuff was asked on the test. I'm just trying to get a reading on the spectrum here but would that be a good generalization?

So from what I'm getting, it's a lot more similar to say if you took Poly Sci as an undergrad where you were given lots of readings and the important stuff was asked on the test. I'm just trying to get a reading on the spectrum here but would that be a good generalization?