Law
Oxford’s Faculty of Law, one of the largest in the UK, offers you the opportunity to study alongside some of the best law graduates of your generation, under the direct supervision of some of the world’s leading legal scholars.
Oxford's reputation for master's-level legal education has few equals. All of the courses on offer involve intensive work to a very high academic standard, and the BCL and MJur are exceptional in their use of tutorials as a principal means of course delivery. Both of these programmes offer an extensive variety of options and the opportunity to specialise in certain fields or to select a diverse combination of courses. For those with more specialist interests, the faculty also offers the MSc in Law and Finance, the MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice, the MSc in Taxation, and the Postgraduate Diploma in Intellectual Property Law and Practice, the MSc in Intellectual Property, and the MSc in International Human Rights Law (formerly known as the MSt in International Human Rights Law and offered by the Department of Continuing Education).
For its research students, the faculty offers a wider range of legal and interdisciplinary specialisms corresponding to the diverse interests of faculty members. For many research students the ultimate goal will be a DPhil, the Oxford term for a doctoral qualification, but the faculty also offers a one-year MPhil course which can either be taken in its own right or as a route into the DPhil. As a research student, you can expect to work closely with a specialist supervisor who will help you develop your ideas and pursue your thesis to a successful conclusion.
Research students play a central role in the intellectual life of the faculty, collaborating in numerous discussion groups and colloquia and participating in many BCL, MJur and MSc course seminars.
Centre for Criminology
Pursuing an innovative programme of criminological research and delivering high quality education.
The Centre for Criminology is an independent unit of the University’s Faculty of Law. The centre is dedicated to pursuing an innovative programme of criminological research and to delivering high-quality graduate education in criminology. It has a vibrant programme of research, aimed principally at fostering and developing clusters of research activity around seven substantive areas:
- security, rights and justice
- penal culture, policy and practice
- politics, legitimacy and criminal justice
- crime and the family
- psychology, criminal justice and law
- victims and victimisation
- criminal justice, citizenship and migration.
Members of the centre are committed to:
- connecting criminological work to the broader concerns of the social sciences;
- thinking comparatively about crime and punishment;
- bringing together sociological and normative approaches to the analysis of crime and justice; and
- working at the intersections between criminology and public policy.
These approaches to the study of crime and criminal justice inform teaching and doctoral supervision in the centre. They create an intellectually stimulating and collaborative environment to pursue your study in criminology.
Centre for Socio-Legal Studies
At the forefront of multidisciplinary research into the nature and role of law in society.
The Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (CSLS) brings together scholars with diverse academic backgrounds and ambitions, who pursue their own research topics and are also encouraged to collaborate widely and develop multifaceted research programmes. Researchers address fundamental questions about the nature of law, its relations with morality, religion, and justice, and its role in regulation, government and community, the nature of rules and legalistic thought, the development of laws, legal systems and legal cultures, and the social character of the rule of law.
The CSLS welcomes students who wish to pursue research in any aspect of socio-legal studies, broadly defined. The centre's staff have a range of expertise in socio-legal research and methodologies and draw on a range of cognate fields, including anthropology, jurisprudence, political science, regulation studies, economics and sociology. Supervision can be offered in most areas of social-legal studies.
The CSLS has a community of around thirteen full-time research staff and thirty-three graduate research students. Links with leading scholars in Oxford’s Faculty of Law and throughout the University enhance the breadth of the centre’s research and the resources made available to students.