Hi so I'm Becca Williams and I'm one of two Law Fellows at Pembroke College and this year I'm also coordinating admissions for the Law Faculty. And hi, I'm Adam Perry and I'm one of the Law Tutors and Fellows at Brasenose College, also at Oxford. So we want to talk to you a little bit about how the interviews work. So you will find that you should have two interviews at one college and then almost certainly a third interview at another college, so you might find when you apply that you apply to one college, you're invited to interview at a different college, you're seen at interview by a third college and then you might even be taken for a place at a fourth college altogether and that's just because we really want to make sure that we spread the applications across Oxford as fairly as possible so that across the whole of the Law Faculty we're taking the absolutely best people that we can on the course. So I'm going to hand over a little bit to Adam to talk to you about what it is that we're looking for in the interview. Thanks Becca. So...just before the interview, you'll you'll almost certainly be given...a bit of text to to read over, about 20 to 30 minutes to read it, and that text might be a case, a legal case, or part of a case, it might be a section of a statute, or it might be a part of an article or some other type of legal material. So as I say, about 20 to 30 minutes to read that over and then you'll be called straight away into the interview room and asked some questions about the material that you've read. And we listen to your answers and ask you follow-up questions and then we try to evaluate what you said against some criteria and there's there's three criteria that we use. So one is about communication, it's just how clearly, how concisely you've articulated your thoughts. The second is about your your reasoning ability, so how well have you understood what you've read, how able are you to respond to objections that the interviewers raise to the points that you make, how well are you able to work out the implications of some of the claims that you've made and so on, so reasoning ability, that's the second point. And the third is about motivation, that's about how keen you are really to study law and so we assess the answers against those criteria and use that to help make admissions decisions. Becca, is there anything you want to add? So just in terms of the role that the interview plays in the whole admissions process, it is obviously important but it is only one of the pieces of information that we look at, so we will also look at things like your GCSE results, if you have any, or your post 16 qualifications, whatever they are, we'll look at those in context so we won't just look at the raw school, we'll look at exactly, you know, how well you performed against your own background and against the context of your own school, and we'll look at your LNAT tests both, your multiple choice test and your essay, so the interview is important but it's only one of the factors that we'll look at alongside those other factors. The other thing that's really important to say is that you don't need to know anything at all before you come to the interview, it's not really an interview that you can revise for like it might be in some other subjects, so really we're just trying to test your innate ability and how well you can do with materials that you've never seen before that you just have to respond to on the spot. So for that reason, when you see us do the interview in a bit the person that we're going to be interviewing is somebody who is herself not a Law student, so she is an Oxford University student but she's not studying Law, so that means she's in the same sort of position that you would be in in that she doesn't know any Law before we start talking to her and it's all about how she reasons through things on the spot.

Well, hello Grace, I'm Adam Perry and I'm a Law Tutor and Fellow at Brasenose College at Oxford. And I'm Becca Williams, I'm one of the two Law tutors at Pembroke College. Thanks a lot for joining us today. So I wanted to start things off by asking you just a few questions based on your personal statement and a little bit more generally and then we'll come to this passage that you've been asked to read, does that sound alright? Yeah that's absolutely fine. Great, so I see from your personal statement that that you like to read and so I was hoping you could tell us about a book that you've read recently that you enjoyed. Yeah absolutely, so one of the books I've read recently is actually a music book, it's Susan McClary's Feminine Endings and it's a very interesting book. It's...it's basically...Susan McClary essentially attempts to put a gendered view on Western, classical music and I think it's particularly fascinating because Western, classical music has just been...it's been gendered masculine throughout history and and it's it's it's great to put a view of gender studies, a more 21st century point of view, on Western, classical music that we we may not necessarily consider in today's society. That sounds really interesting. Could you tell me how is it that that...that view is...that different point of view is is argued for? Yeah. So one of the ways she argues about the gender roles is actually through sonata form, so in sonata form you've got a primary theme, the first theme and a secondary theme and she argues that the primary theme is gendered masculine--it's more assertive and it's more...more like a march kind of theme--whereas the secondary theme is more feminine--it's more lyrical, it's more dolce--and basically she tries to understand how these two themes have kind of been created in that way without actually the composer knowing that he's he's doing that and she links it back to culture, back maybe when Beethoven was writing...yeah so she she tries to unpack that and then basically place it in a 21st century lens. Yeah it's it's it's really fantastic. Oh that sounds that sounds very interesting, I'm sure we could talk about that a lot more but...yeah of course. So in addition to music, you're interested in Law and so I wonder if you could tell us what attracts you to law, why...why do you want to study law? Yeah so one of the main reasons I would like to study law is due to the fact that in law you're you're reading, you're analysing, you're constantly putting a critical lens on on anything that is...with the law it's to do with everyday life, it's...it's present absolutely everywhere so it would be fascinating to do a degree in which you're testing your intellectual capability, in addition to actually doing something that is very contemporary, very current and and can follow you throughout your whole life. Terrific well I think that that is the the hope, so I'm glad that that's how you feel, so...I'm gonna hand things over at this point to to Becca who's gonna ask you the first question and then I'll come back in a little bit later. Becca? Great, thanks Adam. So Grace...we sent you this passage before the interview, have you had a chance to have a look at the passage? Yes I have. And do you feel ok talking to us a little bit about it? Yeah yeah I do, yeah so I can take it away. Yeah yeah exactly so tell us tell us what the passage is about and what's the point that they're making in that passage. So I've basically summarised each paragraph, briefly...tried to put it into more regular words. So the first paragraph I thought that it was talking about how a duty of care should be a relationship of proximity or neighborhood between the two parties. In the second paragraph, part a), before we get to the quote, the issue here is that if you're do-...if you're developing a relationship of proximity or neighborhood, they're very...they're rather intangible concepts so it's very very difficult to measure how...to what degree one has that proximity or fairness, so it's very difficult to measure it in court. And then the quote, Brennan J so...believes we should develop...we have developed categories of negligence and perhaps we could apply those categories of negligence to categories of proximity, fairness, neighbourhood. And then the third paragraph I...I thought that it was...

...Sorry let me just gather my thoughts. Yeah please do take your time.

Yeah so the third paragraph was about chattel which I did have a question about precisely what chattel meant...but basically it was discussing...that one has a duty of care to avoid injury to a personal property but if there's also this opposing side where one has a duty of care to avoid causing others purely economic loss. And before I ask what chattel means...the final paragraph says that there's no legal recognition of any wrong done whose rights are around profits, so the recognition is about injury to the person or property of others whereas there's no recognition if it's just for economic profit. Yes so I had two questions about this paragraph, so the first one was what chattel is defined as? Yeah you're absolutely right, it's a really, really old-fashioned word which we do still use sometimes because you'll find out that law sometimes does use quite old-fashioned words and things and it just means a piece of physical property, so not not a sort of piece of what we call real property like a house or something like that but but just a kind of piece of movable property that's inside that, so so not a person but a thing basically is what you can understand a chattel to be in that sort of context, does that make sense? Yes, yeah that makes sense, so the profit can...the the issue with duty of care to avoid causing economic issues can that be used in like business situations as well as personal? Yeah exactly that's right, so if I just take you...excuse me. If I just take you back to the first paragraph. Yeah. If you're sort of writing rules for somebody and...you know somebody was saying, right I need to know when there's going to be one of these duties of care, what would you say in that first paragraph are kind of the ingredients of the duty of care that you're told that you need to look for there.

I would say, so the ingredients are to do with the proximity and neighborhood so perhaps one might want to like almost define what proximity and neighborhood are. So when I first read this I was considering duty of care in terms of a family law situation, so if you were to take say maybe two parents that have split up and maybe it's a question of duty of care for the child, proximity could be defined as where each parent is living, how accessible is that to the child, and neighborhood perhaps how available is each parent for the duty of of care. So you're right we we use duty of care in lots of different contexts in law and that would be that sort of family law context is very much one that we might use it in. In this paragraph, what they're talking about at the beginning and in that last section that we were just talking about in relation to the chattel, they're talking about situations in which one person causes another person damage, so that's the very particular context in which they're using this idea of duty of care here, so you're absolutely right that they they say that you need a relationship which has something like proximity or neighborhood in it and then there are two other things at the beginning they say that the damage has to be what? And what's the other thing at the end of that paragraph that they also say that the law has to think about in imposing that duty of care?

So at the end, it should be just...it...the law...the court should consider the situation just and reasonable. Yeah. And it should consider the scope of the duty of care. And at the beginning...the court should consider the foreseeability of damage which I suppose...is that...I assume is that considering the level of damage, the...perhaps considering how this has any knock-on effect in the future? Good, exactly, no that's exactly right, that's really good, so let's see if we can sort of test out what we've learned now, so we've got our ingredients and we know what's going to go into making your duty of care so I want you to imagine that I'm driving my car down the road, do you think I have a duty of care to a cyclist on the road? So if I have an accident and I hit that cyclist would the court say, yes, you know, you had a duty of care and so you're liable for the damage to that cyclist, do you think that's what the court would say? Yes, I think the court would say that because if you consider foreseeability, if you were to hit that cyclist...for the cycl--...for you it may just be maybe a bit of whiplash, whereas for the cyclist it could be completely life-changing, so if you consider how those effects could happen in the future, they may not be able to walk, they may have severe brain damage from the situation. And then the duty of care for proximity and neighborhood, I suppose I may be thinking too literally but maybe proximity you are close to the cyclist, you are neighborhood, also proximity related, and then duty of a given scope, I suppose the scope is that while you are within proximity of the cyclist you have a duty of care not to hit that cyclist but the scope is that once you pass that cyclist you have no duty of care for their...the rest of their life. Good, good ok now I imagine that I do have that accident tonight, do hit the cyclist, but there's also somebody standing on the street corner and they see that accident happen and because they, you know, because they're really worried about what's going to happen to the cyclist and they're very traumatized by the whole thing, they then develop PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)...because they've been so emotionally upset by by watching this accident, do you think in those circumstances I would have a duty of care to that person? Do you think I could be held liable for the damage the sort of psychological damage to them? No because...I suppose the pedestrian is not necessarily counted as part of the...like the road situation, the highway code, neither is psychological trauma. Say if you hit the cyclist and the cyclist had a knock-on effect and hit the...hit the pedestrian maybe then you would have some kind of duty of care because it would come under foreseeability maybe and proximity, whereas the PTSD...it's not necessarily a direct result of your action towards the cyclist. Good so if you're going to explain which of our kind of ingredients, if you like, the duty of care is weak there in relation to the pedestrian which which is the one that you think is weak or it's missing, so that's why we haven't got the duty of care there? Perhaps neighborhood, it's not a direct neighbour...I would say the cyclist is a direct neighbour. Good. Yes. Good, ok now a completely different scenario. So I want you to imagine that I'm asleep in my house and downstairs there's a broken floorboard and I know it's broken and I keep thinking, I really must fix that floorboard but I haven't yet and while I'm asleep in the night a burglar comes into the house to come and steal my TV and my computers and things and they fall into the hole in the broken floorboard and they injure themselves. Do you think I've got a duty of care to that burglar? No because the burglar is not supposed to be in your house, so I wou-...I would say that if you...I suppose you could kind of consider these two legal issues...like hanging in the balance, which one is I suppose more of a serious offence. The burglar is directly breaking the law, he's breaking and entering, he's not supposed to be in, so I suppose by breaking that law you kind of maybe negate the duty of care that you would have, whereas if it was maybe a guest you had invited, a family member and they were injured due to the...like the hole in the floorboard then perhaps you would have a duty of care because you had invited them into that...into your home and you in proximity...with them so then the duty of care would...like it would fall to you. Good so you're absolutely right to draw that distinction between a guest and the burglar. What you said is...so are you saying that you think I have got a duty of care but it's just that the law will say, well you might have a duty of care but we're not going to pay attention to that because they're a burglar? Or do you think I might actually not even have the duty of care in the first place, might a bit of the duty of care even be missing? I would say the duty of care would be missing because it is...it's your personal property, it's your house...and the burglar is not...I think the clear distinction is that the burglar is not a guest, the burglar is not supposed to be there. Right, and so because they're not supposed to be there, from my perspective what's missing? So if I if I invite a guest then that thing is present but if it's somebody who comes into my house unannounced and unwanted, what's missing from my point of view? Neighborhood perhaps? Good, ok. So I'm going to hand you over now to Adam to ask you some different questions about some other things. Thanks a lot, so so grace we're gonna switch...you're gonna change gears here a bit so you can, you can put the passage that you read out of your mind for now. Instead I want to ask you about some some other scenarios, ok? Yes. Ok, so this...this first scenario is about a law that says that anyone who is riding a motorcycle needs to wear a helmet, ok? And it's a criminal offence not to...not to do this, not to wear a helmet while riding a motorcycle, but there's a Sikh man who can't physically wear a helmet without removing his turban which he doesn't want to do for religious reasons and so here's a question then, should the law make an exception for this kind of case?

No, I don't think the law should make an exception for this kind of case primarily because with a motorcycle, say if that motorcycle was to be involved in an accident with a car, in fact, or a pedestrian, it is not the...it's not the responsibility of the pedestrian necessarily to move out of the way because that cyclist is maybe not wearing a helmet. The...I suppose you could almost link it back to duty of care that the cyclist should be wearing...the motorcyclist should be wearing a helmet due to the fact that if they were to be in an accident they would, primarily with a car, they would almost be making the driver of the car liable...if they were to have a head injury. Ok, can I just stop you for one one moment, Grace. So let's just put that passage and what you read from it's, out of our minds for now, ok, so we'll treat it as as irrelevant here, so all that talk about duty of care and negligence, let's put that aside for the moment and so we're focusing here on on just this single law that makes it a criminal offence, it doesn't talk about negligence or liability, said it makes it a criminal offence and maybe that's punishable by a fine or some other kind of sanction, some other kind of bad consequence, not to wear a helmet while riding a motorcycle. And so, with that in mind, just the single law in our in our focus, what would you say then? Would you, would you stick with your answer or or would you revise your answer? I would question the law of maybe the religious law of wearing a ...like a turban and and weigh that up against the law of the...like the jurisdiction that the motorcyclist is in.

Ok, I wonder if you could tell me should should the law...do you think law should ever make exceptions to accommodate people's religious beliefs where those beliefs might might require them to act in a way that the law tells people not to act? Should the law ever make exceptions for people's religious beliefs do you think? I would say it depends on the law, it depends on whether the law is preventing others from getting hurt and...other people's...rights...human rights. If if the law covers any of those issues, I think there should be no exception...in that jurisdiction. However, if

...say you were to have a law saying young girls cannot go to school wearing a hijab...let's say...like that's the law in the jurisdiction, wearing a hijab is not harming anyone, it's having no direct impact on anyone else aside from the person wearing the hijab. I think maybe then you would reconsider whether you would follow the law or not. That's a...that's a really good example. So I...I wonder if we could...if you could tell me whether there's a difference between that example that you just gave and the situation where the the...this...the Sikh man wants to ride a motorcycle without removing his turban, so by doing that is the...is the motorcyclist gonna interfere with the rights of others or harm others?

I suppose maybe not directly but if you consider his own...his own rights to stay safe maybe not take up like time from ambulances, etc., you could consider the knock-on effect of like an ambulance rushing to pick him up, the time taking a...like a hospital bed just because he didn't wear a helmet and so you could consider that maybe taking up that hospital bed because you didn't wear a helmet and you are now maybe in a vegetative state, perhaps that is having a knock-on effect on someone who may have needed that hospital bed and that law was already there. Ok, that's a that's an interesting point. So imagine for me then that we didn't have the national health service and that we weren't going to assist this man or he to have an accident and be injured...

would that change your answer?

I...no because I think it would still...there would still be the issue of having hospital beds available, so like without the NHS you'd still need the beds there, regardless of like whether you're gonna pay or not...I think

the man would still be taking up a bed and that bed may be needed by someone who would pay.

Ok, one last variation. So let's just assume that if the...if the man gets into an accident he's gonna die, ok, so he's not gonna be injured so he's not gonna require any medical care, so he's either gonna ride and he's not gonna have any accidents and all is gonna go well or he's going to have an accident and he's going to die, so he's not going to need a hospital bed. Does that change anything? He's not going to require any medical care because he's going to die? Yeah so we're not gonna...we're not gonna spend any money on him and it's not gonna cost the government anything. If he gets into an accident, he's gonna suffer, it's gonna be harm to him but it's not gonna harm anybody else, does that change anything? No because even though he's going to die, if...if one was too maybe, I mean, at the end of the day if he's dead you can't exactly...file a lawsuit against him. However, if

...if...if one was to perhaps ignore the fact that he wasn't wearing a helmet, it could probably...it could probably set a precedent for other motorcyclists who think that it would be ok to do that and that the law would not question the issue.

Ok, that's...that's fair enough Grace, it's probably a pretty...pretty silly scenario I was...I was describing anyway, so I think Becca is going to ask our last question, Becca? Ok cool, so let's imagine and that you are in charge of a country so you can do whatever you want, you don't need to worry about what the law actually is and somebody points out to you that people are quite often killed in accidents at traffic lights because somebody runs a red light, so the proposal is that we should impose the death penalty for anybody who runs a red light and drives through when the light says stop because that way it'll stop the accidents and it'll stop people from being killed. Do you think that's the law that your country should enact? No because, although...sorry, firstly, I would actually question the...in what sense...how would you define running a red light? Would you consider whether this person had done it on purpose or by accident because if this...if someone had run a red light by accident but that law did not cover that situation

then the death penalty would be imposed on someone who had just made a mistake. Ok so then let's let's refine our law and say ok, we'll only impose it for intentional running of red lights, should we say that? Should we have a law that says death penalty if you intentionally run a light? No because

I suppose you could kind of...you could kind of suggest that by having such a law...

if...

I would question also...running a red light, would you...would you have to injure someone, kill someone, or would it just be the death penalty for just the act of...Running the red light, in and of itself, even if no other bad consequences happened. No, I think...I think I wouldn't have that law because I think it would...it would almost create quite a slippery slope of these these kind of laws like running red lights...then you might have one for jaywalking and what if that's the death penalty? I think it would create maybe...to speak of politics and like social...like culture. I would say it would probably create a sense of fear among cultures? So perhaps it would maybe reduce the number of people driving, it would...maybe people would...maybe be afraid to go out, travel. I think it would be detrimental maybe to society and that maybe faith in the ruler to the point that it would...it would be so detrimental that it...it would maybe outweigh the...maybe the reduction in deaths. Good, those are all really, really good points, thank you Grace. So I think that gets us to the end of our interview and are asking you questions, are there any questions that you want to ask us at all? And you absolutely don't have to and if you do ask us any questions they're absolutely not part of the interview, they're just you know if you want to find out any information about anything, please do feel free to ask. So is there anything that you'd like us to to talk to you about? Yeah, so what is the examination structure at Oxford for law? So after two terms...you'd come to Oxford in the October and for two terms you would study three subjects, which is Criminal Law, Constitutional Law and Roman Law and then you'd have exams in those subjects at Easter of your first year, and then when you come back after Easter for the summer term of that year, you start learning subjects which ultimately you'll be examined on at the end of your final year. So if you do the four year course, that's after four years, and if it's the three year course, you do it at the end of three years...and you do those exams right at the end of that...of the course...for your finals, at the end of your final year in the course. At that point most of those exams are exams but you will have done some things like you'll have done a Jurisprudence dissertation after the summer in your second year which counts towards your final marks and some of the papers that you might want to do as your option subjects in your final year, some of those are assessed by extended essay, rather than by...rather than by exam, but you get your final marks for your whole degree awarded at the end of your final year. Fantastic, thank you. Great, well thank you so much for joining us, it's been really nice to talk to you for a little bit. Thank you, Grace.

So the interview is done now and just taking a moment to think about...how it went. I thought, you know, Grace did really well, overall, and just in response to those introductory questions which you know aren't part of the formal interview or don't make up part of our assessment, but I thought Grace was very good at explaining what the book that she was reading was about and summarizing that sort of key argument there...and she also seemed fairly enthusiastic about studying Law which is...which is great, but again that's not part of the formal assessment. I also asked about...this scenario about the motorcycle driver...but maybe I can come back to that. Becca, do you want to say something about that first question? Yeah and I think you're right, it's nice...it's always nice when you see somebody who's kind of genuinely enthusiastic about stuff and maybe they've read something that's beyond kind of what they're...what they have to study but they've kind of gone beyond that and it's really nice to see that and and I think it was, yeah it was great to get that sort of enthusiasm from her. So in terms of the passage, obviously what we're looking for there is somebody to understand the passage, to be able to read it and figure out what's important about it and that process is sort of deriving what the ingredients are, so you might have a lot of words on the page but actually what you want to do is condense it down into, well, basically you need a list of four things or something like that. And she...I thought she was good at doing that, it was good that she could sort of distill those ingredients for the duty of care out of it so that was really good. I was really pleased that she asked about chattel as well because there is often some terminology and we know that's something that candidates might struggle with sometimes... particularly maybe if they're not...they're non-native English speakers to begin with, so it's always good to ask for clarification so I'm really really glad that she did that. And then I thought she did really well applying it to the different scenarios as well, I think that was good, she could see the difference in proximity between the cyclist on the road and the pedestrian who gets PTSD, so she got that one really well. With the...the burglar...there was some really interesting discussion there about whether it was that the duty of care was actually created but then just set to one side because that person was a burglar and so had lost the rights that they had otherwise accrued, or was it that maybe they didn't get those rights in the first place maybe, maybe it was the the duty of care didn't accrue in the first place, and that was a really interesting distinction. And then, you know, obviously sort of looking at things like how foreseeable...the burglar was...that would be something that we would be looking at there. A gue-...If you invite a guest to your house obviously you've got that foreseeability but if it's somebody who arrives unannounced and unwanted then that foreseeability is missing, but I think overall she did really well on the passage and...and she had that sort of ability to to do the close reading and then apply what she she'd read in that context to the scenario and obviously that didn't require her to have any outside knowledge, it just required her to use what she learned on the spot and I think she did really well with that. Yeah so... so on the second question which was about the man wearing a turban for religious reasons he didn't want to remove it...to wear a motorcycle helmet, you know, that was legally required. I thought there were a couple of things that went quite well, so one was that Grace uh was able to to draw some comparisons with other scenarios and the example she gave was...religious dressing in a school context, so I thought that was a

...that was insightful. The second was that she initially assumed that the material from the first question about negligence and a duty of care was relevant here and that's how she started to think about the scenario but when I explained that she should put that out of her her mind, Grace was able to do that which was also good. What maybe didn't go quite as well is that...some of the the later questions I asked her about, you know, imagining a different health service or you know imagining different consequences for the, you know, if there's an accident sort of scenarios I described as as being silly because they were so so implausible, those were meant to get at...to try to assume that there was no harm to others from this this decision not to wear a helmet and I think that...that maybe that's not something that Grace saw clearly in the end. Now that...part of the problem there might have been that the questions were a little bit unclearly worded...and so, you know, I think if Grace was confused there, that might have been an opportunity to ask questions and that's something that candidates should feel very free to do, if they...if the question is poorly worded then it's hard to do but it's important to do to sort of just ask, well could you...could you explain that to me in different words. But, yeah, overall I thought Grace did well there. Yeah, no definitely, that's right, we're a long way from perfect however long we've been doing interviews for so it's always good for people to ask for clarification, I think that's right. And then on the last question about the the death penalty and running the red light, I thought she did really well on that. So in our terminology, we talk about things like the proportionality and we'd say, oh you know that's very disproportionate sentence, and obviously she didn't know that word but she absolutely got that concept so she was using...the way she explained it it was obvious that she understood the the sort of reasoning behind that concept even if she wasn't using that exact word and I think that was really good. And then she also talked about the sort of wider implications that a rule like that might have and that's very much something that we look for in those sorts of questions is, you know, you might set out to create a rule with a particular intent but it might have unforeseen or unintended consequences and can you see what those unintended consequences are, can you see the incentives that it might create that you don't want for society and I thought she was really, really good on that. Again, she didn't use the words 'chilling effect' but that was very much what she was talking about, she was saying, oh this might make people less, you know...more reluctant to drive in the first place and and you know that would be something that we don't want them to do, so I think she was really good on that and I think, you know, say she didn't... she wasn't using the terminology we would use but she was absolutely nailing the concepts underneath it and sort of understanding the unforeseen and unwanted implications of that rule and I think that's exactly what a question like that is trying to get a candidate to do and I thought she did it really well. Yeah I agree and just more generally she stayed sort of calm under...under questioning which is...which is also a good thing.