Warwick or Aberdeen for LLM and PhD in Law?

Thank you to you both, for your input. I apologise if my phrasing was too vague.

What I meant by writing that my interest is in "international law" is this: the focus of both my envisaged LLM research and PhD research is not on domestic English common law or Scots law. LOL! Yes, that is a broad and vague statement. :-) But hey, I am taking to a British audience here, right? I reckon 90% or more of The Student Room posters/active members are living in the UK. If you look at the faculty of any UK law school, many specialise in some aspect of domestic law (whether English, Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish law) and a noticeable minority of the teaching staff would specialise in International law, Comparative International Law or Transnational law. At the University of East Anglia for example, which has a reputable law school, they have less than 5 international law scholars on their faculty.

___________

A few comments on international law as a field of research interest for either LLB, LLM or PhD students/prospective students:

One must be realistic as a law student, whether you are an undergrad, LLM level or PhD. Unless you're a genius with an IQ 160 (which very clearly I am not) and still 16 years old with your whole life ahead of you, it is not possible to pass the California Bar Exam, the Texas bar exam, become a Scottish solicitor, an English solicitor, a Canadian lawyer, and also have competency in EU law and Islamic finance law. Some people manage to pull that off, but you need to have started when you were 7 years old by parents who guided you in that direction, say, if by age 7 you already knew you wanted to become a UN diplomat/envoy.

So what does "international law" mean for everyone else who is not like the aforementioned rare genius types? This is my humble opinion: If you dedicate yourself to mastery of two jurisdictions, then you are dedicated to international law. ey are comfortable supervising (I know because I emailed some of them

Many professionals with legal education aspire to have careers in private or public international law arbitration (i.e. when corporations or nation states or international organisations like the Europol or Green Peace avoid the Courts and go through private arbitration companies to solve disputes). Such individuals must prove their weight in salt by exemplifying mastery of two or three jurisdictions within a specific industry of law (example: competency in Dutch, Belgian and Luxembourg law in the field of EU competition law and EU insolvency law, with a specific focus on Benelux trade deals).

My challenge now is to pick Warwick or Aberdeen as my starting point in this exciting and challenging academic journey of focusing on "international law". Whichever it will be, I can't really go wrong. They are both excellent law schools. It's just a tough call because it really feels like the proverbial fork in the road.

Hello. I received a LLM admissions offer from both Warwick and Aberdeen. I am an international student (Singaporean, but I grew up in California so am culturally very Anglo-American). The dillemma is this: Where I study the 1-year LLM will ***most likely*** also be where I will do the PhD in Law. Hence I am looking at spending the next 4 years of my life at University of Warwick or Aberdeen. Any hints, tips, advice about which law school is better? Beyond school rankings (which of course are not always an accurate representation of true quality in teaching and research) and domestic and global reputation, what about the university town? What are the pros and cons of living in Warwick or Aberdeen for 4 years? This decision will have a huge impact on my career, so any advice would be greatly appreciated! Many thanks.

Thank you so much Jonathan! I will see if I can schedule a short campus visit in a few weeks.

Living at Durham was depressing for me. You make it sound that Aberdeen might be similar, only with greater access to outdoor sports and compensated by the beauty of rural/semi-rural Scotland.

Thank you so much Notoriety. Your post is helping me think more clearly and algorithmically, to arrive at the best solution.

Actually, 2 weeks ago I met one of the 34 elected members of the United Nation's International Law Commission (ILC). I met him in Vienna and we had a brief discussion. For privacy's sake I will not mention his name and the country he represents, but safe to say he is a life-long professor of public international law. A big wig you can say, who like his peers authored or edited brick-heavy books published by Oxford University Press regarding all kinds of special privileged and immunities of the various international organisations. (Perhaps ironically, now that he is officially an extension of the UN, those special privileges and immunities apply to him. If he were to be, for example, assassinated, whether or not the assassination attempt is successful would mean whoever committed the crime have committed a crime against the UN).

The chat with the professor made me lose my interest in public international law. Please don't get me wrong, my respect for the man has not diminished. He is a first class legal scientist (can I use that term? Because people from the astrophysics department tease me that it sounds plain wrong...Lol). My point is... to study Public International Law you have to believe in the good of the United Nations, despite its many flaws and inefficiencies. That belief not negotiable. If you don't, it's like spending a lifetime studying Egyptology while not believing the ancient civilisation of Egypt was important, noble, and fascinating.

I do not believe in the good of the UN, certainly not since 6 years ago, so my research interest is necessarily to study private-public international law regarding government negotiations with multi-national corporations. For example: When private corporations sue governments because the pursuit of their commercial interests have been harmed by the said government. A perfect (more specific) example of this is the oil and gas reserves in Antartica. Nation states of the Arctic Circle, together with the big energy companies, and a few other countries including China, are scrambling to mark their territory and scrambling to claim a stake. Such a research topic is from the vantage point of private-public international law dispute resolution, not solely from public international law. As there is no "court"or "doctrine" who has jurisdiction over them (the aforementioned warring stakeholders) except the UN's Convention of the Law of Seas and UN's general principles and customs of Public International Law, it will be up to international arbitration to decide infringements on the commercial rights or sovereign rights of the disputing alleged stakeholders.

It's too complex for me now of course, so I will do the LLM to prepare me for the PhD dissertation.

In summary, to answer your question directly regarding my research interest: it falls within the realm of public-private international law in cases where there are disputes between private entities (i.e. usually massive multinational corporations) and governments over commercial interests, and their negotiated 'backdoor deals' that including waiving constitutional protections to delivery with expediency the desired result. As you can see, this will be an interdisciplinary research drawing upon critical legal studies (a subfield of the sociology of law), political philosophy, emerging research on very tangible and trackable activities of "shadow governments" as separate and decipherable from the 'public relations' face of nation states in the age of Wikileaks, and private-public international trade law and international investment law.

Thank you again! Your comment forced me to really pinpoint the needle in the haystack.

If I can ask you a last question about this topic of life in Aberdeen, are you saying/implying this article by The Guardian is just a bunch of lies:


https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/nov/24/aberdeen-happiest-place-scotland


And that this time the Daily Mail may have done their homework:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2938376/Aberdeen-named-dismal-town-Scotland.html

I do hope international students visit campus first! The Guardian is arguably the UK's most respected newspaper, so for many of us, just this article alone and a few visits to Aberdeen's Wikitravel page is enough to nudge a decision.

No, I said that you should follow your research interest. You are going a step further and looking at what you might like to do in practice, even though you seem to have a naive understanding of the branches of international law -- you are poorly equipped to say which area you would like to research never mind decide right now where you'll spend your professional life. Plus the threshold for entry into this type of legal work is immensely high; it is more something you end up doing rather than something you set out to do.

Academic interest should be based on what is interesting. I said investment law is not interesting and it is a lot less interesting than parts of public international law; you have not done in any way enough research to rebut this assertion.

You are more interested in talking at me than listening, and you seem to be missing all the conclusions I am reaching as you're too busy writing your next essay.

If you think Durham is quiet and a bubble, then You might find Warwick a lot worse. Warwick is very much a campus uni, with only really Coventry as a near by town/city. And Coventry makes Aberdeen look beautiful/interesting.

I have read your messages carefully: choose what is interesting, otherwise your LLM and PhD will be a pain to complete. That is common sense. From the start I knew and recall you said BIT and investment law was not interesting, but that you've nevertheless (for whatever reason) have been studying it for the past year now.

Just because you find it uninteresting does not mean everyone else will come to the same conclusion. In the same manner, just because I find public international law uninteresting does not mean everyone else does. I agree with you that I must do more research before settling into a specialism (which is the whole point of a LLM before the PhD, especially when you already have a first master's and your LLM will be your 2nd).

I have already answered your question and told you my research interests: international trade deals and negotiations within the structure of the military-industrial-congressional/parliamentary-intelligence complex, and most likely to focus on deals in the energy industry. I did my MSc dissertation partially on this, focusing on the political science perspective, and now I will do the LLM (international law perspective) before going on to a PhD.

The problem is you are completely interested in talking at people, even though you've come here to ask a question rather than answer one. You make a simple task complicated: research specialism is all we needed. So you are saying you're interested in energy law -- fine. Aberdeen is far superior to Warwick in this area. Rather than talk about meeting professors and not believing in the UN project, we have an answer which was given to you in the first and second posts I made in this thread. But all our time has been wasted by your wanting to educate us with inane babbling.

If you think Durham is quiet and a bubble, then You might find Warwick a lot worse. Warwick is very much a campus uni, with only really Coventry as a near by town/city. And Coventry makes Aberdeen look beautiful/interesting.