Introduction to University of Essex School of Law

ESSEX SCHOOL OF LAWWE’LL CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK

Every year our students mark International Human Rights Day by chalking our steps with the Universal Declaration.

It is a big decision deciding where to go to university and what to study. Whether your interest in law was sparked through studying the subject at school or college, through work experience within a law firm, or from what you have encountered in your personal life, in books or the media, you may have little idea what studying the subject at degree level actually entails. When I applied to study law at university I had no idea what the subject would be like but was attracted to it because of a certain US legal drama that I loved to watch!

Whilst you will study many of the same modules on any law degree — such as Criminal Law, Land Law, Tort Law and Public Law — the experience you have as a law student will vary depending on the law school you attend. At Essex, we view ourselves as a less traditional law school. We like to challenge convention — to engage in debates about justice and to question the law. We are passionate about research, not only about what we ourselves research as academics, but about getting students interested in researching important legal issues. You may have met some of our staff at an Open Day or Visit Day — or you may have read about our School of Law on our website. In this booklet, we want to show you a little more of who we are as an academic community — our research interests, the issues we are passionate about, and the topics you may come across as a law student at Essex.

Three of our academics have each written a summary of a particular legal issue — something that they teach and/or research. The three articles reflect our research strengths in Public Law, Commercial Law and Human Rights Law. It is just a sample of what our academics do, but I hope that it will help to give you a feel for what it’s like to immerse yourself in the world of law at Essex.

Get in touchDr Karen Brennan Director of Undergraduate Admissions and RecruitmentSchool of Law University of EssexE [email protected]

Take a look at who we are

What do you see in the inkblot?

Making up the legal mind: How do lawyers think?

Dr Richard Cornes

Dr Richard Cornes is a Senior Lecturer at Essex. His research and teaching interests include public law, comparative law, and psychoanalysis and law. He teaches our optional module, Understanding Judges, which is based on his research into how judges and courts go about their work.

If you would like to know more about how psychoanalytic concepts help us understand the work of judges and lawyers, you can read more by Dr Cornes on the topic, available here: u www.essex.ac.uk/see/richardcornes

The law requires you to look at the world from a neutral perspective. You will learn to set aside your personal reactions; instead you will look to legal principles to analyse situations. Lawyers and judges have to train to do this in order to be able to do their job. At the heart of being a lawyer is the ability to say what the law requires, not what you think personally to be the right outcome.

If, for example, defence lawyers did not learn this they would not be able to defend those they knew for certain had committed the worst types of crime. Similarly, judges hearing those types of cases, have to be able to put aside their personal revulsion of such defendants in order to ensure they receive a fair trial.

Why do we do this? Because we live in a country governed by a principle called the “rule of law”. This means that the same law must apply to all – and that includes the promise that when prosecuted we are assumed to be innocent. And further, that all those who come before the court are entitled to the best defence possible.

Freud, the Unconscious, and Legal ReasoningLet’s “look under the hood” of the legal mind to consider how it is that lawyers and judges come to be able to do their jobs. To understand what’s going on we have to look at the work of one of the great thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Viennese doctor, Sigmund Freud. Dr Freud developed the idea of the unconscious mind. Have you ever had the sensation of an idea coming to you when you were not thinking about it, perhaps an idea for an essay you are working on that “pops into your mind” at some unexpected moment? That’s the work of the unconscious. We are thinking about things in our unconscious all the time.

How does this help us understand how lawyers and judges think? It is this: while legal training helps us consciously set aside our personal feelings and reason solely according to the law, none of us can control what goes on in our unconscious. So, while in our conscious mind we honestly assess the facts as lawyers, and apply the law (consciously ignoring our personal feelings), in our unconscious mind our personal feelings will mix with the law we have learnt. In our unconscious mind our personal feelings will have an impact on how we apply the law.

This does not mean that lawyers and judges are just like politicians, free to support their personal preferences. The difference is that lawyers and judges are trained to put some distance between their personal selves and their legal selves. While personal preferences may still play though into decisions, via the unconscious, they are filtered through the distinct rationality of legal reasoning. It is a subtle difference, but one essential to a democracy based on the rule of law.

Studying for a law degree will change the way you think. Many law students find the first year of their degree the most challenging. This is because you are not only learning the law, but also starting to build a distinct legal psyche, a new version of you.

Why refugee law matters

Professor Geoff Gilbert

Geoff Gilbert is a Professor of Law in the School of Law and Human Rights Centre at Essex. He was Specialist Adviser to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights in its inquiry into the treatment of asylum-seekers, 2006-07. In 2014 he was appointed a consultant to UNHCR (with Anna Magdalena Rüsch) on Rule of Law: Engagement for Solutions and is part of the Solutions Alliance Thematic Group on Rule of Law.

If you want to know more about Professor Gilbert and his teaching and research interests, visit his online profile: u www.essex.ac.uk/see/geoffgilbert

Students lead a barefoot walk to show solidarity with the world’s refugees.

Refugees are hardly out of the news these days, whether it is pictures of those fleeing conflict around the world or, at a later stage in the displacement, making their way across the borders of Europe. Nevertheless, at two levels it all seems to be a question of political manoeuvring, rather than a long-established regime for legal protection.

Parties to armed conflicts seem to have little regard to the fact they are causing the displacement of those not participating in that conflict, and governments haggle over where refugees should be located and how much support should be offered to countries hosting populations of displaced persons.

To be a refugee the first criterion is that one has to have crossed an internationally recognised border. For those displaced within their own country of nationality, they could qualify as an internally displaced person (IDP). There are international guarantees for them, but they are not as strong as those provided for by the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. Assuming that the person has crossed an international border, then given they have a well-founded fear of persecution based on their race, their religion, their nationality, their membership of a particular social group or their political opinion, and they cannot or will not look for the protection of their country of nationality, then they would be refugees. Strange as it might seem, though, just fleeing an armed conflict does not automatically

qualify you as a refugee: did you flee because you, or the group to which you belong, was targeted (so-called ethnic cleansing, for example), or did you just move because the fighting got too close – if the latter, then there is little evidence of “persecution”, so that may not qualify you as a refugee. In the case of the images seen every day on the news, they tend to show people fleeing non-international armed conflicts, civil wars, and there it is much more likely that groups are being targeted based on their religion or their ethnicity, so refugee status is available. And the laws of war require parties to the conflict not to target those not fighting in that conflict, so there is a lot of law in play that should be offering international protection to these victims of war.

Refugee law

In 2014-15, as part of some research carried out for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) with my fellow researcher and Essex graduate, Anna Magdalena Rüsch, we looked at solutions for those displaced, whether they be refugees or IDPs. The average time spent as a displaced person is about twelve years and that average is skewed because of the vast numbers of those fleeing the conflict in Syria in the past five years – the median time is about 20 years and some displaced persons were forced to flee 50 years ago. Protracted displacement, where grandchildren are born in camps or other centres for the displaced, are an international tragedy that demands the attention of the international community.

Traditionally, three durable solutions have been recognised: voluntary repatriation/return, resettlement to another country, or local integration in the place of refuge. However, they take years. Therefore, while those long-term solutions are put in place, the displaced persons need to be able to travel around so as to access health care, employment opportunities, education – and all that has to be developed alongside the needs of the local population.

International law provides the framework for a fair, just and human-rights-friendly response to a humanitarian crisis. However, as is evident from the Syrian refugee crisis, the international community must engage with responsibility sharing to ensure the human rights for everyone and so as to meet the objectives established as recently as September 2015 by the United Nations for the Sustainable Development Goals. Indeed, while the EU member states have been quarrelling over having to take in around one million persons between the 28 of them, Lebanon alone has taken in the same number, a quarter of the population of the whole country – and the GDP of Lebanon is nowhere near as favourable as that of any of the 28 EU member states. As Anna Magdalena and I saw in Niger and Colombia, the local populations there opened their arms in welcome to the displaced, aided by UNHCR and other UN actors. Important questions are raised, therefore, about the role played by the governments of the richer states, and the support they should offer in terms of welcoming some of the displaced as part of responsibility sharing and to ensure that the populations of the less rich countries are not unduly affected by their humanitarian generosity to global crises.

The practice of protection

Our students and staff staging a walk-out to highlight the difficulties the Government’s immigration policies are causing for international students.

The new UK Consumer Rights Act 2015: a one stop shop to enhance consumers’ interests?

Dr Lorna E Gillies

Dr Lorna E Gillies is a Senior Lecturer in Commercial Law at the School of Law at Essex. She has research and teaching interests in private international law, commercial and consumer law.As a student at Essex, you will have the opportunity to work at our Law Clinic, where you may be involved in providing legal advice on consumer issues to clients: u www.essex.ac.uk/see/lawclinic

In September 2015, new UK legislation was introduced which seeks to improve the position of consumers when contracting to buy goods, receive services, or download digital content from traders. The new UK Consumer Rights Act 2015 now regulates many contracts that we, as “consumer buyers”, enter into on a regular basis such as buying food and drink or clothes, going to the hairdresser, or downloading films or music online.

The new Act clarifies and consolidates the law, making it more accessible for the consumer, and it also enhances consumer rights. The legislation also recognises that the location where consumers make their purchases has changed and that the format of products continues to evolve. In particular, it sets out for the first time in statutory form rights in relation to digital content. This new law seeks to be a “one stop shop”, providing rules which determine the rights and duties of the buyer and a trader for the sale and supply of goods, the provision of services and digital content. Building on knowledge acquired in the law of contract, a key question for future law students, practitioners and policy makers is whether the Act will enhance the interests of consumers?

This socio-legal question has pragmatic, practical and commercial significance. On the one hand, the question highlights an on-going debate as to how far the law should regulate the market through protecting consumers in their private contracts with traders. On the other hand, the question focusses on how traders must ensure that consumers’ rights are not affected. In particular, in this respect, is the consequence of contract terms on consumers’ rights when there is a particular problem with the product or service.

What happens once the consumer and a trader enter into a contract and the product or service is defective

in some material way? Before the new Act was introduced, the 1979 Sale of Goods Act provided the consumer with particular remedies. However, these remedies were not always effective, practical or cost effective for the consumer, and, in certain cases, could only be granted by the permission or discretion of the English courts. Prior to the introduction of the 2015 Act, changes were introduced by the European Union which sought to provide greater scope for consumers to obtain access to effective, practical remedies. However, these changes did not go far enough in terms of providing effective consumer protection.

A number of important protections were added by the 2015 Act. For example, in the case of the sale of goods, an important change enables a consumer to request a short term right of rejection. This means that consumers can reject goods within 30 days and obtain a refund. The legislation also sets a specific limit on the number of repairs or replacements that a trader can offer (after 30 days have passed) before the consumer can request a full or partial refund. With regard to the provision of services, depending on the time and nature of the service in question, consumers now have the option to claim repeat performance, seek a reduction in the price, or claim damages. If digital content has been purchased and is defective, the 2015 Act provides consumers with the right to seek its repair or replacement.

Consumers’ interests appear to be better served by this new legislation, but the real impact will ultimately be determined by the remedies applied and how the courts interpret them. Law students, practitioners, policy makers, consumer interest groups, and traders will no doubt continue to examine the impact of this new Act for many years to come. As a consumer, do you think the interests of consumers have been improved by this new law?

You’ve saved up all summer for that tablet you’re going to take to university to get you through all your new work. But when you get home, you find that it’s faulty. What are your rights?

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