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Old 10-11-2018, 01:23 PM
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Originally Posted by Unregistered View Post
WW is a good prof and he is clear, concise and to the point. His hypotheticals are what you deal with as a corporate lawyer in practice.
Part A and Part B should be difficult because of many reasons.
Chief of the reasons are that standards should be set very high to retain the prestige and competency of a Singapore qualified lawyer. Won’t go into other jurisdictions but some have very questionable admission standards.
There is no eccentricity in any of the course setters. U go in you have to be competent which also means being knowledgeable. It’s applied knowledge rather than copying prose.
Failure in Part A and B means that individual need to relook at studying methods and strategy.
UK has to be touch and go because the exams are closed book.
I’m sure you are probably not aware.
When you do an open book, everyone has the same material in front of them.
If you give a tick all the points, what value add do you have? Everyone will write the same thing by virtue of open book exams.
Understand the context first before comparing.
Everyone is well aware that UK law schools have closed book exams.

Actually the fact that UK schools are closed book again proves the point. We can debate the merits of open book (SG, except Contracts) and closed book (UK) till the cows come home, but I don't think any one will argue that being open book, and forcing you to focus on critical analysis rather than rote memorisation+regurgitation, makes for a superior mastery of the subject material. As you said, applied knowledge. It is also far more reflective of practice reality.

It is ironic then that the SMU and NUS law schools (being in the SG education system) are superior in this pedagogic sense to UK.

On the other hand, this I'm sure you're also not aware: when NUS law was founded, it was out of necessity to train substantive lawyers. So its syllabus had to strike a balance between a broad, general UK style undergrad education, and a hard-nosed American style professional education (because US law schools are post-grad professional programmes).

This has set the tone of legal education in SG and reflects in the sheer number of hard, substantive law subjects on offer in NUS/SMU, eg securities regulation, international arbitration, investor-state arbitration, corporate insolvency, corporate drafting etc.

If you compare with UK law schools, they mostly offer a far more limited selection of substantive law subjects, the most substantive usually being the EU-law related subjects. The rest are tilted towards "fluffy" arts-type subjects like "law and gender", human rights, "law and society" and criminology.

Difference in educational ethos and pedagogy is stark, but has a bearing on the quality of law grads produced also, e.g. compare a Singapore law year grad who has studied and been tested on the Securities and Futures Act and Takeover Code once over, and a UK law year grad who has studied and been tested on the various legal issues facing trangendered people.

We're not even talking about whether those who went to UK to study more or less intelligent than those who studied locally.
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