Why study an LLM? (Master of Laws) | with SOAS

This week, Dr Michelle Staggs Kelsall joins the podcast to discuss the LLM (Master of Laws) programme at SOAS, University of London. We look at how the course prepares students for impactful careers, such as roles within the United Nations (UN). We also cover a range of topics, including the intersection of law and global issues, and the future of legal education and practice

Participants

• Emily Slade - podcast producer and host, Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ»ÆƬ
• Dr Michelle Staggs Kelsall - lecturer in international law, SOAS

Transcript

Dr Michelle Staggs Kelsall: So, wow, there's just so many, I don't know where to begin. An array of opportunities for career paths awaits you after a life at SOAS.

Emily Slade: Hello and welcome back to Future You, the podcast brought to you by graduate careers experts, Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ»ÆƬ. I'm your host Emily Slade and in this episode we take a look at the LLM Master of Laws programme available from SOAS University of London.

Dr Michelle Staggs Kelsall: Hi. My name is Dr Michelle Staggs Kelsall. I'm co director of the Center for Human Rights Law and an academic in the law department at SOAS University of London.

Emily Slade: Are you able to give a brief overview of the LLM Master of Laws programme available?

Dr Michelle Staggs Kelsall: Absolutely. The Master of Laws programme at SOAS is like no other currently offered in the United Kingdom, although I would say that wouldn't I? In keeping with so as deep commitment to the Middle East, Africa and Asia and countries outside of Western Europe and North America, more generally, the study of law and postgraduate novel provides students with the opportunity to engage with law from the perspective of non western peoples the world over. This being said, the programme doesn't see this engagement as one sided, and of course, includes components of traditional Masters courses in law such as comparative constitutional law, international law, human rights, environmental law, commercial law and trade and development. What distinguishes soas from other universities is that these aspects of law are situated in their inter sovereign and interrelated context, whether it be understanding informal trade relationships in the Democratic Republic of Congo, criminal justice in China, gender dynamics in law in Southeast Asia, or the International Court of Justice's decisions on the plausible risk of genocide in Gaza. So in other words, there's no one size fits all to law at SOAS, a Masters in Law provides you with a window into law in action across the globe, and the opportunity to speak about why that really matters.

Emily Slade: Yeah, amazing. So what is SOAS's approach to the study of law?

Dr Michelle Staggs Kelsall: Well, like the degree itself, there is no one size fits all approach to studying law at SOAS, our school comprises researchers from a number of scholarly traditions and offering a variety of scholarly scholarly approaches to more many of us ourselves different regions we research on, be it West Africa, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South and Southeast Asia, China, the former Yugoslavia Palestine, or Egypt just today. List view of our faculty. And I would say that what unites us is our commitment to understanding law in the context of where it's being practiced, seeing it as plurally constituted and including always non western approaches with a strong sense of justice at the heart of our research, despite remaining critical and offering a critical approach to the study of law, and many of us too are engaged Scholars, by which I mean that we house policy and practice networks with which we continue to undertake projects. We have scholars engaged with supporting social justice movements in Palestine, Thailand and Sudan, as well as leading scholar practitioners in commercial arbitration in Africa, working across African states. Just to get some examples.

Emily Slade: Perfect, amazing. So can you talk a bit about the research environment? What's that like at the at SOAS?

Dr Michelle Staggs Kelsall: Yeah, so at SOAS, I mean, we really encourage what we'd say is a transdisciplinary approach, which is just a fancy term, or fancy way of saying that we want to see law from the perspective of lots of different fields and disciplines, be it history, politics, sociology, anthropology, or even be fast. We want to think about law understood in new and distinct ways, as well as being critical and engaged in our research. And I suppose I don't like to be too immodest, but our faculty does include leaders in their field, be it constitutional law, international law, environmental law, or commercial law, and commercial and economic law. To name a few. You're joining a law school that, we're really trying to be at the cutting edge of the academic and scholarly research that's out there in law. And many of us have won multi awards for our publications from a number of different sources, both in law, both in the UK and internationally. My own work on disordering international law, to give us one example, has been looking at how processes, norms and conventions, principles in international law are currently determined, and how we might get the, thinking about that looking at different spatial and temporal orders. So thinking about law beyond states, for example, to reframe how legal order is constituted. So to give us an example, one of the things that international lawyers are very concerned about is practice at state. How do government officials make statements and what import or what weight should we give them? So how would we understand a tweet from that perspective? When government officials or diplomats are tweeting each other. What form does that take, and how will that change our understanding what was traditionally diplomatic tables, which, of course, don't exist or are rarely used in the same way in the 21st century. Also, how do we understand time from the perspective of indigenous peoples? And what did that do to our understanding of legal time, or what counts? What events count in law? So these kinds of questions come up in my own research, and it's had quite a good impact. I've been invited to speak both in the United States and in Germany, so I'll be doing a webinar in the Max Planck Institute, Heidelberg, and I'm also going to Stanford University next month to talk about Indo Pacific Regional order as part of that. So it's just different ways of understanding law and different approaches that emerge from research that essentially are becoming having an impact in the world at large.

Emily Slade: Yeah, amazing. So what career paths can students expect to follow, following graduation?

Dr Michelle Staggs Kelsall: So, wow, there's just so many, I don't know where to begin. An array of opportunities for career paths awaits you after a life at SOAS. I mean, it's really, in part, related to how we understand the age stage that we're living through and the globe, planet. So course, at the moment, the world is facing a situation of poly crises, whether we think about climate crises, migration, or biodiversity loss, or the economic problems associated with conflict, more generally, or economic issues, and all of these concerns, essentially, are going to be introduced to you through your study, at bow, at SOAS, and responding to those poly crises require a depth of understanding knowledge that will shape the way you understand how you can then use your degree as such. It gives an example of the kinds of things that people have done after a degree at SOAS we have everything from people beginning, starting their own non governmental organisations, or NGOs, to ensure justice movements are supported in the companies from where they've come. So one of our students runs a very important and impactful Non Governmental Organisation in Libya. We have another student who or several students who are working in United Nations organisations and at different parts of the UN we also have students who go on to commercial arbitration practice in their home jurisdictions, be that in West Africa or Southeast Asia, we also have students who are determined to stay in the UK, but use their time with us to engage in leadership positions.

Emily Slade: Francesca Albanese is an alumni of yours. Can you tell us a bit about her and the work that she's doing?

Dr Michelle Staggs Kelsall: Sure, absolutely. It's with great pleasure that I mention Francesca on this podcast, because she's both a wonderful former student and a very warm person to be engaged with. And in fact, she's coming back this summer, next month, to give an inaugural lecture for the center that I co direct, because she to us, is really an example of what we believe to be all the things that we that we hope our students will go on to do. She embodies many of the principles and commitments of the school itself, in addition to her understanding in depth, knowledge of law in operation and context. So she's an international lawyer, and she specialises in our human rights and the Middle East. And since May of 2022 Francesca has served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 and in addition to incredible scholarly engagement through which she's authored a number of publications, including Palestinian Refugees and International Law, which came out with Oxford University Press in 2020 she's considered to be many as a landmark in the literature on the subject, as well as having undertaken a number of other academic works on the legal situation Israel Palestine and with Palestinian refugees, Francesca brings both commitment and passion for social justice and a desire to remain rigorous in her analysis and to maintain a strong in depth understanding of the role of law in operation, both what it's able to do and what it describes, the reality it describes in the Palestinian territories, and her most recent report, Anatomy of a Genocide, which she wrote, in recent months, has become one of the key things that people are utilising in the current moment to understand the situation in Gaza.

Emily Slade: Wow, that's amazing. So why does studying law now matter more than ever?

Dr Michelle Staggs Kelsall: Well, I suppose, given the depth and breadth of what I've been talking about, what I'm about to say will come as no surprise to your listeners, but essentially, I would say humanity is facing perhaps its greatest existential threat to date, as the world is now entering into a period of ongoing poly crisis, as understood by many, from as diverse as the World Economic Forum to grassroots social movements, polycrisis mired in conflict, climate change and migration, biodiversity loss, the challenge remains To understand both the opportunities and dangers facing the planet, and this remains ever more significant, because really, I think we're coming to a realisation that what was once perceived as a threat to globalisation is now increasingly understood as the threat of globalisation itself, the ongoing demand to secure resources for the few, often to the detriment of the many. And Law at SOAS provides our students with the opportunity to understand the depth and breadth of these concerns and issues from a truly global and into solveric, I would say, from a number of different communities perspectives, and you'll leave us with a much better understanding of your area of expertise. You've already gathered that, or the area you want to work in, should you remain fresh out of an undergraduate degree. There's not much, not much knowledge yet and with that depth of understanding, we think that, studying law matters more than ever, really, because it's in order to give you that critical engagement with the world around you and with what's happening and be able to think about the foundation of knowledge required to understand that in new different ways.

Emily Slade: So finally, what is your biggest piece of advice for someone looking to study law?

Dr Michelle Staggs Kelsall: I think my biggest piece of advice would be, be prepared for an adventure. Be prepared to challenge yourself and your own thinking about what law is and how it works in the world. Be prepared for a lot of reading, and to expect a kind of rigor and depth in analysis, but also to be surprised and challenged by the new ways in which that helps to see the world, and also the kinds of people that you're going to meet when you do so, I think people who tend to gravitate toward law, it tends to be sort of people who are coming both from the humanities and the sciences, or like a mix of the two, because law is both problem solving on the one hand, but it's also about persuasion. It's about understanding the aesthetics of a situation, the aesthetics of an argument as well. So you need to be both passionate and committed, but also be able to state your case and to make your claims as a lawyer. So a Masters in Law really opens up the door to both understand how that works, but also challenge it. Think of it in ways. Think about arguing ways. Why we are arguing, what a critical approach to that might be.

Emily Slade: brilliant. That's fantastic. Well, thank you so so much for your time today.

Dr Michelle Staggs Kelsall: Thank you it's been a pleasure to speak with you.

Emily Slade: Thanks again to Michelle for her time. For more information onthe course check out the shown notes below, if you enjoyed the episode feel free to leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. Thank you as always for listening and good luck on your journey to future you.

Notes on transcript

This transcript was produced using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. The audio version is definitive and should be checked before quoting.

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