Public international law postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in public international law began with a question I could not answer in a first-year tutorial: if a state pollutes a river that flows into a neighbour, who is actually obliged to do anything about it, and to whom? I gave a confident answer about treaties, and my tutor pointed out that I had assumed the existence of the very obligation I was meant to prove. That gap between the appearance of rules and the harder work of locating their source has shaped my reading ever since.

My LLB dissertation returned to that question properly. I looked at the law of state responsibility alongside obligations of prevention in shared watercourse regimes, using the Pulp Mills judgment and the 1997 Watercourses Convention as reference points. What I found most instructive was not the substantive standard but the evidential and procedural difficulty: establishing attribution, demonstrating harm across a border, and identifying who has standing to complain. Writing it taught me to be sceptical of tidy textbook summaries and to read judgments and commentaries for what they leave unresolved. It also left me wanting to study the sources of international law far more rigorously than an undergraduate survey allows, particularly the formation of customary rules and the practical weight of soft law instruments in state practice.

Alongside my degree I took options in public law and human rights, and a jurisprudence module that improved my writing more than any other. I now work as a paralegal in the immigration team of a small firm. The work is mostly domestic and procedural: taking instructions, assembling bundles, chasing country-of-origin information for asylum submissions. But it has given me a concrete sense of how international obligations arrive in a national system, usually in fragments. Refugee Convention arguments reach the tribunal filtered through statute, rules and case law, and the argument that persuades is rarely the most elegant statement of principle. That has made me curious about incorporation, margin of appreciation reasoning, and the gap between an obligation in the abstract and its effect on a person waiting for a decision letter.

Outside work I volunteer as a note-taker at a weekly community advice drop-in, where I sit in on sessions about housing, benefits and debt and write up a clear record for the adviser. It is unglamorous and it has sharpened two skills I expect to need: listening to a long, unstructured account and identifying the legally relevant facts, and writing something another person can rely on without being present. I also have my cousins most Saturdays while my aunt works, which has forced me to be disciplined about when I read. I do my dense reading early on weekday mornings, and I have kept a reading notebook since second year, currently working through Crawford's Brownlie's Principles and following ICJ proceedings when judgments are published.

I am applying for master's study because I want to move from familiarity with international law to genuine competence in it. I am particularly keen to study the law of treaties, international dispute settlement and the interaction between environmental and human rights obligations, and to write an extended dissertation with proper supervision, ideally on procedural obligations of prevention where harm is diffuse. In the longer term I would like to practise in public law and international protection, or work in a research capacity for an organisation doing monitoring and reporting. Either route requires the depth this degree offers, and I am ready for the reading it demands.