Master in Advanced Studies in Public Law postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The minutes I found hardest to write as assistant clerk to my town council were for a twelve-minute item on allotment rents. Councillors disagreed about whether a rise should be phased, a resident spoke during public participation, and the vote was close. My job was to record what was decided and why, in language neutral enough that anyone reading it a year later could see the reasons without my opinion leaking in. I rewrote the resolution three times before the clerk approved it. That evening made something concrete for me that my degree had treated more abstractly: the legitimacy of public decisions depends on whether their reasoning can be traced afterwards. I want to study public law at an advanced level to understand that relationship between process, reasons and accountability more rigorously, and across more than one legal system.

I graduated last summer with an LLB. My dissertation examined how courts in England and Wales have applied the public sector equality duty under section 149 of the Equality Act 2010 in challenges to public library closures. I started from the principles summarised in Bracking v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, particularly that the duty must be exercised with rigour and an open mind and is not a box-ticking exercise, and then read a series of first-instance judgments to see how those principles worked once a council had produced an equality impact assessment. My conclusion was modest: the courts generally assess the quality of the authority's consideration rather than the merits of the closure, which protects democratic choice but can leave affected groups with a remedy that only sends the decision back to be made again, sometimes with the same outcome. Writing it taught me to read judgments for their structure of reasoning rather than just their result, and to be careful about claiming more than a small set of cases supports.

Alongside my final year and since graduating, I have worked around fifteen hours a week for the town council. I prepare and publish agendas within the statutory notice period, take minutes, answer routine correspondence and maintain the register of councillors' interests. None of this involves legal advice, and I would not describe it as practice, but it has given me a working sense of how procedural rules feel from inside a small public body: often helpful, occasionally frustrating, and rarely understood by the residents they are meant to protect. I have become the person who explains to members of the public how to get an item onto an agenda, which I enjoy more than I expected.

At weekends I referee under-12 football in a local league. It is unrelated to law, but it has made me comfortable making decisions quickly, explaining them briefly to annoyed adults, and accepting that consistency matters more than any single call.

My main academic interest now is proportionality. Studying Bank Mellat v HM Treasury (No 2) showed me how a structured four-stage test can make judicial reasoning more transparent, yet I am unsure how far that transparency survives when courts give public bodies a wide margin of judgement. I would like to compare how different constitutional traditions, including civil law systems with specialist constitutional courts, handle that tension, and how administrative law doctrines interact with fundamental rights review. Studying in Spain would let me approach these questions without assuming the common law framing is the default. I have been learning Spanish for two years and currently work at around B1 level, reading short court press summaries and news coverage of constitutional disputes to build vocabulary, and I intend to keep improving it.

I bring careful reading, steady written work, and practical familiarity with how public decisions are recorded and questioned. In the longer term I hope to work in public law, possibly in local government or regulatory work, where clear reasoning matters to people who never see a courtroom. Advanced study would give me the comparative and doctrinal depth to do that well.