Anyone on the London LLB + Columbia JD course?

I graduated from King's in 2003 (straight LLB) and they instituted this joint course the following academic year. I would have killed to get onto it!!!!!

Anyone out there on it or know anyone doing it? Would be interesting to hear about what it's like.

Cheers, C.

UCL do it and I might as well try If you can't afford it the UCL law faculty will usually help you out (thanks to their devotion to Jeremy Bentham & his principles!).

The Faculty are good if you are in financial difficulties, but whatever they may lead you to think, they're not that good!

Well they wouldn't pay all of it obviously but ... i was told they could provide some assistance...

Yeah I had a read in the prospectus that only 2 people per year are accepted and it's a competition on the basis of grades, so presumably you need a first overall in your first year.

Certainly I wouldn't pick King's solely on the basis that it offers this joint degree if only two individuals from each intake will end up being selected for it (though there are, of course, many other good reasons for picking KCL!).

Told by whom?! lol

Is it wise for me to say? lol

Some student showing us around was gonna go and they were prepared to offer him "financial assistance" but he decided not to in the end, as he wanted to stay and do an LLM.

Kingslaw, well good luck, I hope you get it, Columbia is an amazing college with a fantastic law school. I'm waiting to see if I got in for a PhD in political science at the moment.

Yeah I had a read in the prospectus that only 2 people per year are accepted and it's a competition on the basis of grades, so presumably you need a first overall in your first year.


I wouldn't pick King's solely on the basis that it offers this joint degree when only two individuals from each intake will end up being selected for it, but there are, of course, many other good reasons for picking KCL!

What've you been up to since you graduated from King's then? If you're applying for PhD's at Columbia you must be doing pretty well!!

Thanks. Well after graduating I was really torn between starting the BVC and continuing with academia. In the end I opted for the latter and went across the road to do a master's in political theory at the LSE (this course here which I really enjoyed). It picked up on my jurisprudence interests (I'm a big John Rawls fan - when you get to 3rd year juris you'll either love A Theory of Justice or you'll hate it!)

I finished the MSc in September and applied for PhDs in the US. So far I've been accepted with full scholarship to do a PhD in Government at Georgetown University, specialising in political philosophy and the theory of international law, I'm still waiting on NYU and Columbia, and I got rejected from a bunch of other places (including Harvard and Princeton).

But I'm really happy about going to G'town, in fact in a couple of weeks I'll be flying out to Washington DC for an open day and a look around the city and campus. If all goes well, I'll be moving there in September and won't be coming home for 5 years! (US PhDs take longer)

That's alright I don't mind telling you on here.

I got a 2:1 from King's. My exam grades were mixed, a couple of firsts, mostly mid to high 2:1s and two 2:2s (oops). My references from my KCL tutors were very, very good though (I got on well with them and worked hard in class), and I have a feeling they said something along the lines of "would have got a first overall if he had been as good in the exams as he was during the year". I got the medical law prize in my third year for my first in the exam+dissertation.

Things got better at the LSE, I really found my niche, and ended up graduating with the highest first in my MSc year, with an offer to publish my dissertation in an academic journal if I put some work into refining it (haven't got round to doing it yet though).

My plan is to have a go at academia, mainly in legal and political philosophy, particularly Rawlsian liberalism and theories of global justice, perhaps with a view to returning to the UK sometime soon after and combining this with a part-time public law practice at the Bar.

Going to the US seems especially attractive since there is much more funding on offer than here at home - if you get into a good college, it is likely that you will be fully funded (tuition fees waived plus grant to live on) for the duration of the doctorate. Plus the US PhD is structured differently from UK counterpart; thesis research takes 3 years (as here) but before you get to that stage you must complete 2 years of attending classes/seminars, writing essays and sitting exams (hence 5 year total), effectively doing another MA. I'm keen on this since it will make up for the fact that my undergrad, whilst sometimes relevant for what I'm doing now, was not in philosophy or politics, so I've yet to study most of the major canon yet, and will do so in those first 2 years. I don't regret getting an LLB though - on balance, it was a really good degree.