Climate Law & Justice [LLM] postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most of the calls I take at work begin with a number. A customer reads me the emergency credit left on their prepayment meter, and together we work out how many days it will last. As a customer adviser for an energy supplier, I explain debt recovery rates, arrange support credit where the rules allow it, and refer people to advice services. The work has made one feature of energy policy very concrete for me. The costs of decarbonisation and of volatile prices do not fall evenly, and the people least able to absorb them often have the least room to shape the decisions behind them. I want to study climate law and justice to understand how legal frameworks distribute those burdens, and how they might do so more fairly.

My interest began academically during my LLB, when an environmental law course introduced me to the Aarhus Convention. I was struck that it treats access to information, public participation and access to justice as linked rights rather than separate procedural favours. I took this up in my dissertation, which examined whether cost rules in Scotland meaningfully allow community groups to challenge decisions on onshore wind developments. Article 9(4) requires that review procedures should not be prohibitively expensive. I wanted to test how far protective expenses orders met that standard in practice, so I read the relevant Court of Session decisions alongside commentary and the Aarhus Compliance Committee's findings concerning the United Kingdom. My conclusion was modest. The rules had improved, but uncertainty about adverse costs still seemed likely to deter small groups before any formal application was made. My supervisor encouraged me to separate what the case law showed from what I was inferring about deterrence. That discipline is something I want to keep developing at postgraduate level.

Since graduating I have widened my reading beyond procedure. I followed the Urgenda litigation, in which the Dutch Supreme Court held that the state's duties under Articles 2 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights required it to reduce emissions by at least 25 per cent from 1990 levels by the end of 2020. I then read the European Court of Human Rights judgment in KlimaSeniorinnen v Switzerland, which found a violation of Article 8 while narrowing standing for individual applicants. Reading them together raised a question I keep returning to. If courts increasingly recognise climate obligations but limit who can enforce them, does justice depend more on well-organised associations than on those most directly affected? My dissertation touched on the same tension from a domestic angle, and I would like to explore it comparatively.

Outside work, I take minutes for my local community council. It is unglamorous, but it has taught me how consultation actually reaches people. Last year we responded to a proposed battery storage site. I drafted a summary of the planning documents in plain language so that residents could comment on the substance rather than on rumour. Several people told me it was the first time they had understood what they were being asked. I also run with a hill running club. Spending weekends on estates that combine grazing, forestry and turbines has given me a practical sense of how much land use is now bound up with climate policy.

I bring a sound grounding in public and environmental law, careful research habits and daily experience of explaining complex rules to people under pressure. I am particularly interested in procedural rights, energy affordability and the relationship between human rights litigation and legislative targets. A taught LLM would give me the doctrinal depth and comparative range to pursue this seriously. I hope eventually to work in policy or advice roles where legal analysis connects directly with the people I currently speak to on the phone.