MRes Law

Overview

The MRes in Law aims to provide students with advanced skills in legal research, the ability to undertake high level analysis of law and legal issues with a focus on areas of research specific to the School of Law at SOAS, a grasp of the research methods that underpin the discipline and its place in the humanities and the social sciences, a grounding in legal research methods, and the ethics of legal research. The MRres in Law is especially suited to candidates who wish to undertake a PhD or professional research in law. It prepares students to undertake high-quality research.

The SOAS MRes in Law is a unique qualification that brings together in-depth training in research and research methods focused on the research done in the School of Law. This is combined with other courses that are specific to SOAS and often not available anywhere else.

The degree has been developed to meet the needs of both researchers and practitioners. The programme is thus ideally suited to prepare for a PhD in Law at SOAS, or alternatively as a stand-alone qualification, for instance, for jobs requiring in-depth policy research.

Teaching & Learning

All Masters programmes consist of 180 credits, made up of taught modules of 30 or 15 credits, taught over 10 or 20 weeks, and a dissertation of 90 credits. The programme structure shows which modules are compulsory and which optional.

As a rough guide, 1 credit equals approximately 10 hours of work. Most of this will be independent study, including reading and research, preparing coursework, revising for examinations and so on. It will also include class time, which may include lectures, seminars and other classes. Some subjects, such as learning a language, have more class time than others. At SOAS, most postgraduate modules have a one hour lecture and a one hour seminar every week, but this does vary.