Letters to a Law Student

About our author Nick McBride is a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was formerly a Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, having studied law at Brasenose College, Oxford, both as an undergraduate and for the Oxford Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) exam. As well as Letters to a Law Student, he has written (with Roderick Bagshaw) a textbook on Tort Law, the 7th edition of which was published in 2024 and cited with approval by the UK Supreme Court in Tindall v Chief Constable of Thames Valley [2025] AC 1046 and by the Privy Council in Rubis Bahamas Ltd v Russell [2026] UKPC 9. He has also written (with Sandy Steel) Great Debates in Jurisprudence (Hart Publishing, 2nd edn, 2018), which has now been translated into Chinese, and contributed two volumes to the Key Ideas in Law series (which he edits): Key Ideas in Contract Law (Hart Publishing, 2017) and Key Ideas in Trusts Law (Hart Publishing, 2023); Key Ideas in Contract Law was translated into Japanese in 2020.He has also written a two-part work on the values underlying English private law, the nature of human flourishing and the future of the West: The Humanity of Private Law, Part I: Explanation (Hart Publishing, 2019), and The Humanity of Private Law, Part II: Evaluation (Hart Publishing, 2020). In August 2020 he was appointed by the then Lord Chancellor, Robert Buckland QC, to serve on an independent panel (chaired by Lord Faulks) to conduct an Independent Review of Administrative Law. The panel’s report, which was delivered in March 2021, formed the basis of the Judicial Review and Courts Act 2022. He ranks in the top 0.2% of authors on the Social Sciences Research Network (5,382 out of 2,669,899), where almost all of his papers are available for download.

• PART 1: THINKING ABOUT STUDYING LAW Letter 1: What is law?Letter 2: Why you should study lawLetter 3: Why not do something else?Letter 4: But is law the right subject for me?PART 2: PREPARING TO STUDY LAW Letter 5: A fundamental problemLetter 6: On free speechLetter 7: Means and endsLetter 8: Acts and omissionsLetter 9: The many and the fewLetter 10: The harm principleLetter 11: Justice and rightsLetter 12: How (and how not) to argueLetter 13: Doing the LNATPART 3: STUDYING LAW Letter 14: The secrets to your successLetter 15: Avoiding problemsLetter 16: What AI can (and cannot) do for youLetter 17: Making the most of your timeLetter 18: Using a textbookLetter 19: Reading casesLetter 20: A brief history of law reportingLetter 21: Making sense of statutesLetter 22: Getting through articlesLetter 23: Getting the most out of where you arePART 4: WRITING LIKE A LAWYER Letter 24: Writing essaysLetter 25: Answering problem questionsLetter 26: Doing coursework and a dissertationLetter 27: Revising for, and doing, examsPART 5: AFTER STUDYING LAW Letter 28: Moving onAPPENDICES A. A mini-dictionary of lawB. Century Insurance v Northern Ireland Road Transport Board [1942] AC 509Suggestions for Further Reading