MRes - Socio-Legal Research

I took the MRes as a precursor to a socio-legal PhD. The relationship between law and society has always been of interest to me and the course enabled me to expand my knowledge beyond purely doctrinal legal analysis.

There is a real sense of working “with” academics at Exeter not merely under. This means from day one you are treated as a colleague, with your own research treated as just that, yours. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole course and would highly recommend it to anyone thinking of embarking on a Law PhD and/or as an alternative to the LLM. The course introduced me to a range of ideas and approaches without which I would not have thought about.

One of the best things about the MRes has been the enthusiasm of the teaching staff. I have also enjoyed being able to think about law from a very different perspective; I studied law at undergraduate level and then pursued a career in practice, so starting to think as a researcher has been a very new experience.

The University is highly regarded for socio-legal research in family law, which was a big draw for me. I also found both teaching and administrative staff to be very welcoming and incredibly helpful when I was first applying, which was a very different experience to elsewhere.

The MRes course has been invaluable in preparing me for PhD research. Being taught theory and methods and having to put them into practice in a dissertation has given me much more confidence for my PhD. I also feel that I have a clearer direction for my research. The other big advantage of the course was that it gave me the chance to meet PhD students from across the College, who I might not otherwise have come into contact with.

Having done an LLB and LLM at the University of Aberdeen, I came to realise that I was interested in the socio-legal implications of law rather than just the black-letter law. I wanted to do an inter-disciplinary PhD that involved applying methods and theory from the social sciences to my main research interest, Family Law. Fortunately I received ESRC funding to undertake the MRes in Socio-Legal Research at Exeter followed by the PhD and the MRes research-training masters is exposing me to new ways of looking at the law as well a solid grounding in the various methods of empirical data collection and analysis that will be invaluable during my PhD.