International law postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in international law began with a fairly ordinary question I could not answer. Sailing with a small club on the Solent, I noticed how much of what we did was governed by rules nobody at the slipway could name: collision regulations, buoyage, charted limits that stop somewhere out at sea. Looking into where those limits came from led me to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and then to the odd realisation that a document negotiated over nine years by states with almost nothing in common still shapes whether I can legally anchor in a particular bay. That combination of high politics and practical consequence is what I want to study properly.

My LLB gave me the foundations, and my dissertation gave me the first taste of doing international legal research rather than reading about it. I wrote on how coastal states articulate maritime boundary claims, comparing the reasoning in the Black Sea delimitation case with arguments advanced in the South China Sea arbitration. The most useful thing I learned was how much work is done by apparently technical choices: which baselines are asserted, whether a feature is a rock or an island, what counts as relevant coast. I also learned the limits of my own method. I had assumed I could treat state practice as a tidy evidence base, and instead spent weeks deciding whether statements in press releases and diplomatic notes could be weighed against each other at all. Supervision helped me narrow the question, and I finished with a clearer sense of why sources doctrine matters so much in this field.

Alongside my degree and since graduating I have read fairly widely, mostly on my commute. Crawford's Brownlie's Principles of Public International Law has been my reference point, and I found Koskenniemi's writing on fragmentation genuinely unsettling in a productive way: it made me stop assuming that international law is a single coherent system with a hierarchy waiting to be discovered. I follow the ICJ's list of pending cases and try to read at least the summaries of judgments, and I have been working through separate and dissenting opinions because they show disagreement about method more openly than majority reasoning does.

For the past two years I have worked as a paralegal in the immigration team of a small firm. The work is not international law, but it is not unconnected. I draft chronologies, gather country evidence, and prepare bundles for appeals where the Refugee Convention definition and Article 3 arguments sit behind everything, however briefly they are addressed in practice. I have learned to read guidance and case law quickly for the point that matters, to keep accurate records, and to explain a poor outcome to someone who has waited a long time for it. I also help at a weekend advice drop-in, mainly translating and helping people fill in forms, and I manage correspondence and appointments for my grandmother, which has taught me more about patience and administrative detail than any module.

I am applying now because I have reached the edge of what I can teach myself. I want structured study of state responsibility, treaty interpretation and dispute settlement, and the chance to write a longer piece on how tribunals handle scientific and technical evidence in maritime and environmental disputes. In the longer term I hope to qualify and work in public international law or in government legal practice, but I would be satisfied to leave a master's degree simply reading the field with more confidence and less credulity than I do at present.

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