AS Level Law (OCR) Help!

OMG SO, I'm studying AS Level law and it is the HARDEST/LONGEST subject I'm doing. I was summarizing 1 chapter today, and my notes are equivalent to A WHOLE UNIT of Politics notes! AND THERE ARE 18 CHAPTERS IN LAW. This cannot be right? My teachers won't give me a definitive checklist of information you need to know, like they do for my other subjects and the OCR one on the site is dated to 2008 and is a little different. I NEED HELP AND TIPS FOR AS LEVEL LAW GUYS. Like any checklists and stuff. Thanks!

Reply 1

Gallifreyan95

13

I do AQA Law, but I can't imagine they are TOO different.

If there is anything in particular that I covered and you need to I should be able to help at least a little.

Reply 2

davidvitali

OP

Original post by Gallifreyan95

I do AQA Law, but I can't imagine they are TOO different.

If there is anything in particular that I covered and you need to I should be able to help at least a little.

Hello! yes all the help I can get will be greatly appreciated! I just want to know, is it as long for you, as it is for me? I mean, as I said, there is WAY too much information to learn!

Reply 3

Tortious

16

Original post by davidvitali

Hello! yes all the help I can get will be greatly appreciated! I just want to know, is it as long for you, as it is for me? I mean, as I said, there is WAY too much information to learn!

There is a fair amount of ground to cover. I'm reading law at Cambridge and found that my A Level (AQA) covered about 3/4 of the Criminal syllabus here.

Reply 4

Gallifreyan95

13

Original post by davidvitali

Hello! yes all the help I can get will be greatly appreciated! I just want to know, is it as long for you, as it is for me? I mean, as I said, there is WAY too much information to learn!

There is a huge amount, and it doesn't help that its a completely new topic to be coming into.

Just thinking about Unit One and about how the reading gets much more intensive for A2. I mean, not as bad as History, but still....

Reply 5

davidvitali

OP

Original post by Gallifreyan95

There is a huge amount, and it doesn't help that its a completely new topic to be coming into.

Just thinking about Unit One and about how the reading gets much more intensive for A2. I mean, not as bad as History, but still....

omg so, we DO have to remember all that information? It can't be! One whole Politics Unit of revision is equal to ONE CHAPTER in the law text book...omg :frown:

Reply 6

Gallifreyan95

13

Original post by Tortious

There is a fair amount of ground to cover. I'm reading law at Cambridge and found that my A Level (AQA) covered about 3/4 of the Criminal syllabus here.

Do you find that having studied Law at A Level its helped you/made it slightly easier to get into the routine of studying it at University?

I'm going to study Law should my grades be good enough (touch wood) and was wondering if Uni's went over things such as the Parlimentary System of Lawmaking, Offences Against the Person, Murder ect ect from the beginning.

Original post by davidvitali

omg so, we DO have to remember all that information? It can't be! One whole Politics Unit of revision is equal to ONE CHAPTER in the law text book...omg :frown:

What sort of things are you looking at at the moment? Just wondering how much OCR differs from AQA.
Have you done Statutory Interpretation, Delegated Legislation and things like that? I can't remember much about them other than I had to learn about them!

(edited 11 years ago)

Reply 7

Tortious

16

Original post by Gallifreyan95

Do you find that having studied Law at A Level its helped you/made it slightly easier to get into the routine of studying it at University?

I'm going to study Law should my grades be good enough (touch wood) and was wondering if Uni's went over things such as the Parlimentary System of Lawmaking, Offences Against the Person, Murder ect ect from the beginning.

Yeah, they don't assume any level of prior legal knowledge, but I found it extremely useful from the perspective both of knowing the law and of knowing how to find and "read" cases (i.e. appreciating the arguments made by the judges but also being able to find the ratio). In fact, one of my exam questions was on the law's attitudes to women - I was able to write a pretty good answer contrasting the special and partial defences to murder under the HA 1957 and the "loss of control" defence under C&JA 2009 (because I'd studied the "old" law for A Level and the "new" law in 2010!). It's amazing how well the cases and their facts stick in your long-term memory too; having an extra two years to get to grips with Criminal lightened my overall workload significantly.

Reply 8

davidvitali

OP

As Unit 1 is: Civil Cases, ADR, Police Powers, Pre-Trial Procedures in Criminal Cases, Criminal Courts, Criminal Appeals, Sentencing, The Judiciary, The Legal Proffession, Magistrates, Juries, Funding and Provision of Services.
Unit 2: Judicial Precedent, Acts of Parliament, Delegated Legislation, Statutory Interpretation, European Law, Law Reform

UMMM Apparently we have to know ALL of that? And there are like a minimum of 6 pages of information PER EACH OF THOSE. Not right at all...

Reply 9

Tortious

16

Original post by davidvitali

As Unit 1 is: Civil Cases, ADR, Police Powers, Pre-Trial Procedures in Criminal Cases, Criminal Courts, Criminal Appeals, Sentencing, The Judiciary, The Legal Proffession, Magistrates, Juries, Funding and Provision of Services.
Unit 2: Judicial Precedent, Acts of Parliament, Delegated Legislation, Statutory Interpretation, European Law, Law Reform

UMMM Apparently we have to know ALL of that? And there are like a minimum of 6 pages of information PER EACH OF THOSE. Not right at all...

You can't be expected to learn everything - it's physically impossible. What you need to do is go through past papers and identify the trends of questions that come up. If you have to answer four questions (out of eight, say), pick your favourite four topics and two backups and just learn those.

Reply 10

ArsenalWenger

8

Hi davidvitali, I do OCR Law and am an A2 student. I got an A at AS(195ums) :biggrin:

. Yes it seems like alot of info but condensing the info into notes made it easier for me. For unit 1(English legal system) you have a choice of questions in the exam so you can leave about 3-4 of the small chapters out. For unit 2(sources of law), you answer all the questions on one of those topics you listed, so my college never taught EU law since whatever happened we would be able to answer the questions on at least one of the topics and this gave us more revision time.

Hope I helped.

Reply 11

davidvitali

OP

Original post by ArsenalWenger

Hi davidvitali, I do OCR Law and am an A2 student. I got an A at AS(195ums) :biggrin:

. Yes it seems like alot of info but condensing the info into notes made it easier for me. For unit 1(English legal system) you have a choice of questions in the exam so you can leave about 3-4 of the small chapters out. For unit 2(sources of law), you answer all the questions on one of those topics you listed, so my college never taught EU law since whatever happened we would be able to answer the questions on at least one of the topics and this gave us more revision time.

Hope I helped.

Hello! Omg that really helped, can we chat privately! I have a few more questions regarding this I need to ask! Thanks so much.

Yeah np

OP

Original post by ArsenalWenger

Yeah np

So which 3-4 chapters do you suggest I leave out?
And which chapters do you suggest I revise thoroughly?
How many notes did you come out with eventually for Unit 1? Is there anything important I should know? Like cases, acts etc?

Reply 14

oluus

Original post by ArsenalWenger

Hi davidvitali, I do OCR Law and am an A2 student. I got an A at AS(195ums) :biggrin:

. Yes it seems like alot of info but condensing the info into notes made it easier for me. For unit 1(English legal system) you have a choice of questions in the exam so you can leave about 3-4 of the small chapters out. For unit 2(sources of law), you answer all the questions on one of those topics you listed, so my college never taught EU law since whatever happened we would be able to answer the questions on at least one of the topics and this gave us more revision time.

Hope I helped.

That is exactly what my college did, though I think they only left out 2 max 3 chapters (they definitely didn't teach us about civil cases and legal funding.) If you look at the past papers you get 7 questions out of which you need to answer 4, meaning you have a lot to choose from. Make sure you learn the most popular topics that pretty much ALWAYS come up on the exam eg Magistates/Judiciary/Legal Profession/Juries (section A), and then try to revise Bail/Sentencing as those are likely to come up in section B of the exam. In my exam I did just that and luckily all the sections I decided were worth revising actually came up on the exam. Though it is quite risky and ideally you should try and revise everything but I agree that there is a lot to learn :s

Original post by davidvitali

So which 3-4 chapters do you suggest I leave out?
And which chapters do you suggest I revise thoroughly?
How many notes did you come out with eventually for Unit 1? Is there anything important I should know? Like cases, acts etc?

Learning cases and acts always gets you extra marks. My teacher always says that if you're aiming for an A*/A you should try and include those.

(edited 11 years ago)

Reply 15

BooWoodcock

Original post by davidvitali

As Unit 1 is: Civil Cases, ADR, Police Powers, Pre-Trial Procedures in Criminal Cases, Criminal Courts, Criminal Appeals, Sentencing, The Judiciary, The Legal Proffession, Magistrates, Juries, Funding and Provision of Services.
Unit 2: Judicial Precedent, Acts of Parliament, Delegated Legislation, Statutory Interpretation, European Law, Law Reform

UMMM Apparently we have to know ALL of that? And there are like a minimum of 6 pages of information PER EACH OF THOSE. Not right at all...

I took OCR As last year and am currently taking the A2. I got an A last year and am hoping for an A* this year to help me get to London to study Law!

In terms of leaving chapters out, it's a risky strategy (accepting some schools/colleges make that decision for you) because some of the questions can look like curveballs, and by not revising topics you are limiting your choice of question - and thereby risk having to answer a horrid question of a topic you've revised!

Saying that it's natural to have favourites which you understand/ revise more (for me sentencing, police powers and bail were my faves for ELS and judicial precedent and statutory interpretation for Sources of Law)

Any specific questions?

Posted from TSR Mobile

Reply 16

davidvitali

OP

Hey guys! I'm confused again...which 4 topics would DEFINITELY come up do you think? And will the (a) and (b) questions be on the same topic? Or like (a) is for one topic and (b) would be on a whole other topic?

Reply 17

HelloThere:)

Original post by davidvitali

Hey guys! I'm confused again...which 4 topics would DEFINITELY come up do you think? And will the (a) and (b) questions be on the same topic? Or like (a) is for one topic and (b) would be on a whole other topic?

police powers and sentencing always comes up so know that inside out and then I would say revise civil court systems and the woolf reforms, ADR would be good. Normally its best to know equal criminal and civil topics so I would say that's a good balance but I'd revise an extra fifth topic like juries or magistrates to be on the safe side, good luck!

Posted from TSR Mobile

Reply 18

BooWoodcock

Original post by davidvitali

Hey guys! I'm confused again...which 4 topics would DEFINITELY come up do you think? And will the (a) and (b) questions be on the same topic? Or like (a) is for one topic and (b) would be on a whole other topic?

In terms of topics that will come up, looking at past papers is definitely you're best strategy. I remember that police powers was a very popular section B question because it lends itself nicely to the scenarios! Sentencing is a very popular topic, as is juries (although that does have a few more cases, which you should be including to get a grade B or above) my teacher told me legal aid was not going to come up, so I didn't particularly revise it. There was a section A question on it but I simply didn't do it! No issues there really!

No topic will ever come up (I don't believe having done the research on past papers) for both a section A and a section B for the ELS paper. I stand to be corrected but it seems highly improbable.

Fpr the sources of law paper, think of EU law, stat interpretation, delegated legislation and precedent as the 4 main topics, law reform often feeds into these topics (particularly precedent) and acts of parliament is a smaller topic. Those 4 'main topics' come up pretty equally across all papers.

Hope that helps!

Reply 19

Ash1096

Does anyone know the meaning of delegated legislation?

AS Level Law (OCR) Help!

Quick Reply

Related discussions

Latest

Trending

Trending

Articles for you