Law Personal Statementfor Oxford & Cambridge

I want to study law because it gives a disciplined way of dealing with serious disagreement. I first read the Supreme Court judgment in R (Miller) v The Prime Minister after an A level Politics lesson on whether the British constitution can survive on convention in moments of strain. What held my attention was not simply that the Court ruled the prorogation of Parliament unlawful on 24 September 2019, but that it treated the dispute as a legal one by reasoning from parliamentary sovereignty and accountability. I wanted to understand how judges could set a legal limit on a prerogative power usually described in political rather than statutory terms. Reading the judgment showed me that public law is not only about institutions and powers; it is also about the method by which courts turn constitutional principles into standards that can decide cases. That is what draws me to degree-level law: the close reading of cases, the testing of principles against counter-arguments, and the question of what gives legal reasoning authority when the answer is not obvious.

My studies have given me the framework for pursuing that question in a more exact way. In Politics, Dicey's account of parliamentary sovereignty at first made Miller seem straightforward: the Court had protected Parliament. The more I read, the less neat that looked. In Tom Bingham's The Rule of Law, I was struck by the insistence that public power must be exercised within legal limits and not arbitrarily; seen through that lens, the judgment looked less like judicial expansion and more like constitutional protection. H L A Hart unsettled that comfort. His discussion of the open texture of rules made hard cases seem less like exercises in finding a hidden answer and more like arguments about how legal language works at its edge. That changed the way I read Miller. I still thought the outcome was right, but I became more interested in how it justified correctness. I took that further in an EPQ on whether the prorogation judgment is better understood as a defence of parliamentary sovereignty or as an expansion of judicial power. I structured it around three authorities: Miller, the GCHQ case on the reviewability of prerogative power, and R (UNISON) v Lord Chancellor on access to justice as a constitutional principle. At first my argument was too tidy because I wanted to separate law from politics and show that the Court had simply applied neutral principle. The comparison made that difficult to sustain. By the end, I was less certain that there is a clean line between principled adjudication and judicial overreach, but more convinced that legal reasoning matters because it forces disagreement to be argued through reasons and authorities rather than left to assertion alone.