Law Reading List
Welcome Letter from Law Tutors
Dear incoming first-year Law students,
now that your results have reached us, we are happy to confirm that you will be joining Lincoln College in October. Congratulations! We are looking forward to having you with us. You will receive much information from the College about various aspects of life here. This letter is about the academic dimension.
During your first two terms with us, you will study Roman Law, Constitutional Law, and Criminal Law. You will take University examinations in all three subjects – known as Law Moderations, or ‘Mods’ – in the week after the end of the second term, in March 2025. You must pass them to proceed with the course, and so we expect you will want to acquit yourself well. You will also pursue a non-examinable course in Study Skills, which is unique to Lincoln College.
These first two terms will be exciting for you, but they might also be quite daunting. (In case you have doubts, it is okay to admit this!) You will have to make all the adjustments involved in coming to university, meeting new people, finding your way around a new city, and so on – not least, finding the energy for it all.
By comparison with school, the pressure of work may feel quite heavy. You will be embarking on a new subject, which you will probably find quite difficult at first. While nobody expects the impossible of you, it is not easy to get three subjects up to examination standard in two terms. (There is a silver lining, though. The more you put into your work at this stage, the easier and more satisfying you will find it thereafter. What is more, having passed your Mods in March, you will have a summer without exams, probably for the first time you can remember!) That is why we are keen to make things easier for you by getting some of the learning curve out of the way before you arrive.
Background reading
Not only does the study of law require its own set of skills and intellectual approaches, but the nature of study is also distinctive. You will spend much of your time doing independent, critical reading from long and varied reading lists. What is more, that reading will rarely result in simple or neat answers to the questions being asked. For this reason, we encourage you to throw yourself wholeheartedly into the study of law. The books we suggest may help you.
The titles deal with the study of law in different respects. You do not need to read all of them, but it would certainly be good if you managed eventually to read more than one. They should not be treated as providing a set of rules to be followed strictly, but they will help you to think about the challenges ahead. They will also develop your understanding of legal methods. They are (in roughly ascending order of sophistication and difficulty):
G Rivlin, First Steps in the Law (Oxford University Press, 7th edn, 2015)
M Berlins and C Dyer, The Law Machine (Penguin, 2000)
T Honoré, About Law: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 1996)
ATH Smith (ed.) G Williams, Learning the Law (Sweet & Maxwell, 17th edn, 2020) AWB Simpson, Invitation to Law (Wiley-Blackwell, 1991)
J Waldron, The Law (Routledge, 1990)
F C Montague, A Sketch of English Legal History (The Lawbook Exchange, 1915 – available for free at this link)
Written work
The written work we have set comprises some further reading and exercises, focusing both on study skills and your Mods subjects, and especially on some ideas and techniques with which you will want to be familiar at the start of the course. Please see the links below.
Please type your answers in 12 point double-spaced with the usual margins and return them to us by 1st October as email attachments to stefan.enchelmaier@law.ox.ac.uk. Please send them as separate documents and remember to put your surname in each file name and on the documents themselves. Completing the preparatory work without undue pressure might take you three weeks. Remember to allow time, too, for getting hold of the books.
Books
You can borrow the books mentioned from (or through, via inter-library loan) your local library. Alternatively, you can buy them. If you buy any books, be sure to keep the receipts, to take advantage of the College’s book grant scheme. Details of the scheme will be sent to you in due course. Please note that since the law is in a constant state of evolution, it is important to use the latest editions of books. (It might well be that since the last update of the above list, new editions have been published.) You may find an older one on sale, but it will usually be out of date and thus of very little use to you.
Good luck, and please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any queries. We are looking forward to seeing you in October!
Reading Lists and Preparatory Work