Common law personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

Almost every removal quote I prepare includes a clause capping our liability for damage at a set amount per item unless the customer buys extra cover. For six years I have explained that clause on the phone, and for most of that time I treated it as a plain fact. Last year a customer asked whether it would still hold if our crew had been careless rather than unlucky. I did not know. Finding out led me to the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and its fairness test for terms in consumer contracts, and to the older principle that courts read an exclusion clause narrowly against the party relying on it. What held my attention was that the answer depended partly on statute and partly on how judges had reasoned through earlier disputes. I want to study common law to understand that reasoning properly: how a principle is drawn out of particular facts, and how far it can be stretched before a later court distinguishes it. Studying English law in Scotland also makes sense for me. I grew up in Cumbria, have family on both sides of the border, and have moved enough households between the two systems to notice that a tenancy or a deposit is not handled the same way in each.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I left school at seventeen with GCSEs and one AS level and went straight into work. In 2024 I enrolled on an evening Access to Higher Education Diploma in Humanities and Social Sciences, which I am completing alongside my full-time job. The law units have been the most demanding. For my contract assignment I applied Hadley v Baxendale to a modern late-delivery scenario, and the hardest part was resisting the urge to argue what seemed fair and instead working through the test for remoteness of loss. My extended essay examined Donoghue v Stevenson, a Scottish appeal that became the starting point for the modern law of negligence in England. Writing it taught me to read Lord Atkin's neighbour principle alongside the dissenting speeches rather than as a slogan, and my tutor's feedback pushed me to build each paragraph around one clear claim. Outside the course I have read Nicholas McBride's Letters to a Law Student, which made me realistic about the volume of reading and the discipline of answering problem questions. I have also spent two mornings in the public gallery of my local sheriff court, where I noticed how much depended on the documents people brought with them.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

My job combines the office and the van. Three days a week I build quotes, schedule crews and handle damage claims; on busy weekends I still carry boxes. Doing both has made me careful with detail, because a survey that misses a piano on a second floor costs a crew two hours and a customer their afternoon. Handling claims means reading photographs, inventories and emails, then setting out calmly what was agreed and what was not, often for someone who has just moved house and is understandably upset. I have learned to separate what a person feels happened from what the paperwork shows, while still taking the feeling seriously. Last year I rewrote our claims letter template so it explains the liability cap in plain words, and complaints about that clause have become noticeably less heated. Away from work I play fiddle in a ceilidh band that does weddings and village halls about twice a month. It has nothing to do with law, but it has taught me to rehearse until something is reliable under pressure. I also edit the newsletter for our tenants' association, turning committee minutes into four readable pages. Fitting the Access course around shifts and gigs has shown me I can keep to a demanding timetable, and I am ready to give that effort to full-time study.