prospective law student

Sure! (people will have inferred that I'm waiting around for someone and have nothing better to do than browse the Law forum on TSR)

I'm at LSE right now. I've put my grades in the spoiler below.

I'm actually very happy with my uni's law course. The Law Department here is actually quite small (60-70 full time academics), which means that they've having to roll out their best for lectures (people like Horder/Duxbury/Poole/Lacey/Gearty). It doesn't quite match Oxford's lineup, but we're still talking about very well-known academics within their fields, so you are getting great levels of insight all round. I'm expecting even better next year, given that I'm moving into more specialised modules.

Generally speaking, good academics are also seasoned public speakers, so their lectures tend to be animated, with plenty of questions etc. There are quite a few dud lecturers - more so in the half-module courses such as Property I - but you can always spend those lectures copy-pasting the Powerpoint or doing something else that's productive.

Classes are good, even though the teaching is hit-and-miss. You can usually tell the dedicated teaching-oriented staff from the rest - they are far better organised, and incorporate more ways of teaching into a lesson other than a lecture + a small but directionless discussion. I'd say that 50% of my teachers this year were great in every respect, and the other 50% lacking in some way (ranging from being too awkward to going through the material too slowly). The funny thing is that a lot of your teachers, despite their junior status, are often outstanding in their own right - I was taught by a Harvard JD and a former advisor to the Euro Commission this year :O PhD student teaching is rare, at least in first year.

The workload is more than manageable if you're willing to put in hours during the day (between and after lectures) and over the weekend. I think I have around 40 hours of work a week all in, but then again I did work harder than most. Expect more independent reading time, and much less face-to-face contact time, than you got at school. We get 12 hours of contact (8 hours of lectures, 4 hours of classes) a week.

Exams start very early in the first year (you're going to have to start revising towards the end of LT if you want anything close to a strong 2.1), but they space out more in Part I and II, ending as far back as mid-June. They screwed up the second-year timetable, but everything exam-related went smoothly for first years, at least from an organisational perspective!

The actual things you do are more or less the same as any other uni in the UK. You're expected to read x many pages of textbook, with additional readings available on the list. You're also expected to look at primary material (namely case reports), even though the amount of reading that you'll do for statutes will be minimal. The reading of articles commenting on the law are very common. During the reading weeks and holidays, you're expected to look beyond the reading list for additional material, which can usually be done through a simple search on Google/Westlaw, or by looking through the references in an article/book. This is more or less a requirement if you need a 2.1. The lectures give excellent outlines, but they're obviously not sufficient on their own going into exams. Looking beyond the lectures is even a point of feedback that you get after exams!