Criminal Law and Criminal Justice LLM postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Several times each evening, the till at the pharmacy where I work stops me with a prompt: confirm the customer's age, check whether they have bought a codeine product recently, refuse if unsure. The rule is blunt, and I have watched it frustrate people with perfectly good reasons and occasionally stop someone who should have been stopped. Applying it fairly means knowing what the rule is for, not just what it says. That habit of asking what a rule is protecting against is what drew me to criminal law during my LLB, and it is why I now want to study criminal law and criminal justice at postgraduate level.

My undergraduate dissertation examined the requirement of corroboration in Scots criminal law and the debate over whether it should be abolished, particularly in relation to sexual offences. I began expecting to argue for abolition, since the requirement is often blamed for low prosecution rates in cases where there are rarely two independent sources of evidence. Working through the Carloway Review, the later reports responding to it and appeal decisions such as Lord Advocate's Reference (No 1 of 2023), I became more cautious. I concluded that abolition without stronger safeguards elsewhere, such as changes to jury majorities or to how judges direct juries, risks shifting a problem rather than solving it. The dissertation received a high 2:1 mark, and my supervisor's main comment was that my analysis of the safeguards debate was stronger than my historical chapter. I agree, and it showed me that what interests me most is how the different parts of a justice system depend on one another.

Outside the dissertation, my strongest modules were evidence and criminal procedure. I also took an optional criminology course, which introduced me to research on why victims disengage from prosecutions. I found the empirical work harder than doctrinal analysis, because I had to judge the quality of interview-based studies rather than the reasoning of a court. I would like to develop that skill properly, as I think criminal law scholarship is weaker when it ignores what actually happens to people moving through the system.

I have worked at the pharmacy throughout university and since graduating, mostly on evening and weekend shifts. Beyond age checks, the job has taught me to explain refusals calmly and to recognise when a situation needs the pharmacist rather than me. It is ordinary work, but it has given me a lot of practice in applying fixed policies to people who are tired, unwell or annoyed. It has also made me less patient with legal arguments that treat compliance as automatic.

For three seasons I have helped organise a five-a-side league for teenagers at a local sports centre, which mainly involves fixtures, chasing kit and occasionally ruling on disputes about eligibility. Writing a simple one-page set of league rules, after one argument over a borrowed player, was surprisingly satisfying. I also play a lot of online chess, which has more to do with relaxing than with law, although reviewing my lost games has made me better at revisiting my own reasoning without defensiveness.

At postgraduate level I want to study the law of evidence and criminal procedure comparatively, looking at how Scotland, England and Wales and other jurisdictions handle the tension between protecting accused people and securing convictions where evidence is scarce. I am also interested in sentencing and in how criminal law treats vulnerable witnesses. In the longer term I am considering either the traineeship route into criminal practice or policy work on justice reform. A focused year of advanced study would help me test which suits me, while giving me the research grounding to contribute seriously to whichever path I take. I would bring careful reading, steady habits from years of balancing work with study, and a genuine wish to understand how criminal justice works in practice as well as on paper.