Land went terribly. I went in with a statute book full of its own weight in highlighter ink and rainbow tags, and felt like I couldn’t remember anything: not structure, not rules, not cases. It was all a bit of a shambolic mess, and I ran out of time on the Co-Ownership question; I’d say it’s still even money that I passed on the strength [possibly not the right word] of my Easements and Freehold Covenants answers, but only barely. I think it was burnout, really: I was just knackered beyond belief, and my poor overstuffed mind couldn’t take any more. Talking to other GDL students afterwards indicated quite a few of them felt the same. So it was a bad way to end, but hey.

After the exam we all went back to my place to celebrate, via Sainsbury’s to stock up on masses of booze and meat. Despite valiant efforts by skilled pyromancer Budge LJ and the purchase of a bottle of firestarting gel, we couldn’t get the barbecue to work, so ended up just using the oven to prep burgers and sausages, which were enjoyed on the terrace in the beautiful afternoon sun. The weather has been glorious this week – already the sun is bleaching blonde highlights into my hair (they’re natural, shut up), and it really feels like summer’s come out to celebrate the end of the GDL with us.

Six hours and a considerable amount of alcohol later, it all got a bit stereotypical, and the night finished with tucking shivering paralytics under blankets and picking vomit out of the carpet. But it was mostly very civilised and great fun, and the more sober of us performed as stoically and dutifully under chaotic adversity as you would expect from wannabe commercial lawyers. Use this in interviews, chaps.

Exams are over; it’s just the piece-of-piss SAT and CAT to go, and then two months of holidays and other things I’m really going to enjoy. The sun is shining, and I am demob happy.

Criminal went pretty well. Disappointingly thin on unlawful-act manslaughter, and a bizarre number of typos in the script, but Theft went like dishonestly appropriated clockwork, the chaps brutalising each other on the assault course ticked almost every box in the Offences against the Person Act in style, and I got to waffle, dissemble and shoehorn in some inchoate offences.

I’m as tired as I’ve ever been, goodnight.

Glaister-Carlisle v Glaister-Carlisle [1968]
AN INTENTION TO TRANSFER LEGAL TITLE MUST BE CLEAR AND UNEQUIVOCAL
Husband and wife were having an argument. Husband threw his poodle at his wife and said ‘here, you keep the bitch’.
HELD – the Husband had not manifested a clear and unequivocal intention to transfer title of the poodle to the wife.

Equity and Trusts might well be the single hardest thing I’ve ever done. The law itself is frequently horrific unintuitive nonsense, and everything about the teaching has sucked apart from the London lecturers (who we don’t get teaching us.) The manual sucks. The textbook sucks. The GDL Answered chapter was moderate to suck. Our tutor was… less than perfectly competent. Picking subjects was a mess, because most of the self-contained ones are either bullshit or potentially essay questions; the reliable problem questions are a sprawl of half a dozen different topics coming up in random combinations. I’ve had hopes for some modules, but this wasn’t one of them.

I boned up on Equitable Tracing, which is generally popular and well-done, usually being based around arithmetic so simple you don’t even need to take your shoes off; Equitable Remedies, which is also popular but usually quite badly done, and Formalities & Constitution, a broad and messy topic. Sam plumped for Implied Trusts rather than Remedies, which is simple, logical, and self-contained, but frequently comes up as an essay rather than a problem question, which was what stopped me doing it.

The Formalities & Constitution paper had six separate dispositions. Six! Every past paper we tried had four, with complicated relationships between them, and finicky little distinction-grade details, like Re Baden jurisprudence on the certainty of “relatives” in a discretionary trust (which I’d carefully memorised). None of that, no subtlety, just six ugly little problems with hundreds of boring rote-learned elements to deal with and precious Great Expectations-themed names. Remedies actually went really well, I think, and will definitely lift my average, but Tracing, that well-known mainstay of predictable simplicity, somehow contrived to be an absolute wreck, starting bad and getting worse in the same there’s-no-chance-to-show-off-but-if-you-slip-up-on-any-of-these-million-fiddly-repetitive-bits-you’re-FUCKED fashion as Formalities & Constitution. Oh, and the invigilator was actually our E&T tutor, who insisted on taking away the USB sticks to print off individually, wasting still more time and patience when Criminal needed doing. All in all: a miserable, drawn-out, shambolic excuse for a boring clusterfuck, par for (a) terrible course.

While the rest of the day has been an utterly knackering slog through Criminal Law (as thanks to the confluence of a bank holiday Monday and bad BPP calendar planning, we have back-to-back exams), the day has been a victory on one central and important count. I’m pretty sure I passed, and that means I never have to do Equity & Trusts ever the fuck again.

The number of great bus-themed stupidity torts that came up in Employer’s/Vicarious Liability is amazing.
Beard v London Omnibus – conductor with delusions of grandeur running over pedestrians.
Limpus v London Omnibus – bus drivers drag racing.
Keppel Bus Co v Saab Bin Ahmad – bus conductor twats a passenger over the head with his ticket machine.

…after exams I’m going to watch On the Buses. By which I mean watch about half an episode of On the Buses, realise that absolutely everything about it is rubbish, and go and rewatch The Wire instead, because it’s been too long.

The original plan was to go home and revise in the afternoon after each exam, giving us a day and a half of straight prep for each, but we found we were both much too knackered after Con & Ad to do more than an hour’s work, so didn’t even try after Contract, instead going off to the cinema to watch Star Trek: Into Darkness with Misha. (Verdict: like its 2009 predecessor, fun and glossy but not intelligent. Lots of bitty little gifset moments, lots of minor character flourishes, lots of silly plotholes and overwrought scenes, but ultimately the same dumb extended-chase-sequence plot as every generic movie ever. Though Benedict Cumberbatch did the whole “contemptuous ubermensch” thing jolly well; I hate to be One Of Those People, but he’s actually quite a good actor. If you want a proper review, Mr Reeve wrote a good one.)

That aside, it’s been a mess of cramming, flashcards, cabin fever, overeating, chuckling at lines on this page, and mispronouncing case names til we laugh ourselves sick in fits of law student hysteria. (“Cuwwoden?” “Wiwwiams.” “Damn, that was a good move. I’ve got to… no. Fuck. Checkmate :(“) It reminds me of the adrenaline mess that was first year’s exam period, before I learned to confine the panicked pressure-rush to the schwerpunkt of the actual exam paper and got to basically relax for the entirety of third term.

It’s still strange, picking out topics and cramming a few very specific until I know them back to front and in my sleep to the point that I get nightmares about Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball. It all puts the rest of the year under a doubtful light, all the book-grinding and shamming and and uncertainty in class. But I suppose if I’d been told that I was only doing these three subjects for the exam, it would make no difference, because I want to know the law – that’s half the point of the course. And boiling it all down into just eighteen hours of exams (plus the take-home coursework, the MCT, the CAT, the SAT…) is a necessary compromise for a one-year course; no human could actually learn all our topics to assessment-grade quality; just eighteen is a hell of a stretch. And from what I gather, actual three-year law degrees don’t get assessed much more completely than this.

Contract… Contract went alright. I think. I didn’t really shine anywhere, and while Remedies and Terms & Exemption Clauses were perfectly competent I think I messed up Offer & Acceptance a bit. Again, I’m absolutely positive it was pass-worthy, but no idea if it was worth 65% or 45%. For Tort on Friday, I’d bet my first two answers actually were commendation-tier, so slickly and completely did the parts prepared in my mind fall into place for Employers’/Vicarious Liability and Nuisance, but I still wouldn’t bet on anything given my answer for Occupiers’ Liability, which was as mushy and disjointed as a pileup in a trifle factory. So I’m still a bit all over the place, in a weird sort of ambition-limbo where I don’t know at all if I’m getting a pass or a commendation, so half the time I’m filled with “YEAH I CAN GET THE COMMENDATION, LET’S DO THIS” drive and half “meh, I’m definitely good enough to get a pass with what I’m doing, why stress myself out by burning the candle at both ends? this qualification is a box-ticking exercise.”

It’s a funny old conflict of pride and passivity, and it doesn’t really matter either way: I already have the degree and the CV brimful of the shit the HR people say they like; I don’t need more ammo for the job applications, because the problem isn’t a lack of good-quality munitions, it’s that the targets are bulletproof.

The box is halfway ticked now, and I’m on the upstroke. Eleven days to go.

Constitutional & Administrative was today, the first of the six “serious” GDL exams (Con & Ad, Contract, Tort, Equity & Trusts, Criminal, Land. We also have a Case Analysis and Statute Analysis, which aren’t particularly serious) Revising for it was slightly less of a Russian roulette game than the other subjects: we know there’ll be one essay on a Constitutional topic, one Human Rights essay-or-problem-question, and one Judicial Review. As with most subjects, we studied three topics, our choices being guided by a) careful statistical analysis of past papers, b) our tutor dropping heavy hints as to what would come up and c) further to b), some of our comrades got him drunk and asked him nicely what to revise. So we were fairly sure Parliamentary Sovereignty, Article 8 and Illegality were safe bets, and if not, well, we were fucked. I hadn’t realised quite what a weight of worry had built up until I opened the paper and found that the right questions were there.

Parl Sov went alright. As law goes, it’s nicely waffly and theoretical, always assessed by essay, with a set of obvious points to include (Dicey’s precious, specious theory of PARLIAMENTARY SOVEREIGNTY, and the principal challenges to it: the EU/Factortame, Human Rights, Jackson) but sufficient leeway for my inner Arts student to pontificate and bullshit and bring in other arguments where available (ie: as a purely legal theory which doesn’t take into account practical or political factors it’s inherently irrelevant to the real world.) It went alright, I think.

I was somewhat worried about the Judicial Review problem question. In most problem questions you have a sort of sequential process, lots of principles which you apply one after another, and while you need to remember a case for every authority, it is possible to miss authorities as long as you remember the principles. Whereas for Judicial Review there are like fourteen different parallel principles which you have to apply to the facts at the same stage – so some minister acting out of turn can be done for ultra vires, and mistake of evidence, and relevant/irrelevant factors, and all sorts of other stuff, in a hundred little mini-sequences like legal whack-a-mole, and you never think you’ve got all of the buggers. (One of our authorities is a case from 1925 which says that public authorities have a duty to pay their employees as little as they can get away with.) But I remembered the prelims, I hit the obvious bases, I think I had the correct authorities – it was more right than wrong.

Article 8 – the most conventional problem-questiony answer of the three – was not my finest moment. I’m sure it was passworthy – the pass mark for Con & Ad seems to be “come in, write your name and a couple of random cases, 40%” – but I wouldn’t like to say beyond that.

I have no idea, overall, if that paper was commendation-worthy or just a pass. In this, it mirrors my entire GDL experience so far. But I guess I win either way: a mere pass on the GDL (and I am going to pass) is a qualification with significant academic street cred, a commendation is just that but better. (A distinction? hahahaha piss off.)

Contract on Wednesday. Onwards and downwards.

Back at uni, in the middle of each term we had a week off (in the middle of the first and second term, anyway; third term was entirely off.) They were called “Reading Weeks”, though nobody was quite sure why. For the students they were a nice half-term holiday, a break from our full, demanding timetable of sleeping, procrastinating over coursework and not doing dissertation work to go off skiing (or, say, invade Moscow). For the uni, they similarly provided much-needed respite from toiling away scheduling three whole contact hours per week and studiously avoiding putting anything useful on WebCT. Stories existed of students in other departments, people studying real subjects, who actually used Reading Week to read, but all the people I asked doing real subjects didn’t get reading weeks.

The GDL doesn’t have those. The GDL has “Assessment Weeks”, in which you read. And read and read and read. And, in the case of last week, write the EU essay, revise for and then sit the EU exam. The former was a bit of a disappointment, both to me and (I fear) the assessor; 1500 words isn’t an essay, it’s a footnote, and there’s no space to develop any real arguments or deviate enough from the script to show creativity – the only art to it is in working out which parts of the short, raggedy history of the EU to condense down and shoehorn in. But I wrote it, I’m proud enough of how it’s written and how many points it managed to touch upon, and ultimately it’s a piddlingly small part of the assessment.

Revising for the EU exam, a substantially less piddling 7%, was something else. I’m one of those appalling people who gets by without ever really revising for anything,* so structuring a way to remember about 150 important EU cases turned out to be a challenge – ultimately involving a lot of listening to lectures (which are wonderfully lucid – our EU/Con & Ad tutor-lecturer is fantastic), a spreadsheet compiled by an old L4NL bro studying in London, and a piece of flashcard software called Mnemosyne, and a lot of Skyping fellow GDL students.

[18:27:00] Lear: Would it count as cheating if we took a mars bar into the exam?
[18:27:10] Brosencrantz: is the mars bar 10% bigger?
[18:27:14] Lear: yes
[18:27:19] Brosencrantz: maybe
[18:27:22] Brosencrantz: I’m going to do that now
[18:27:30] Misha: i’ll bring Belgium margarine
[18:27:37] Misha: cube shaped
[18:27:58] Lear: I’ll bring some Cassis
[18:27:58] Roger: I’m going to bring chiquitas!!
[18:27:59] Budge: I’ll bring a French film on DVD, but only released 8 months ago ]:)

But all in all, it sunk in decently and I think the actual exam went pretty well. There were only a couple of questions where I felt my prep hadn’t served, as well as a couple of bits which I felt I just hadn’t prepped because we hadn’t really covered them, but took a swing anyway. EU law is wonderfully common-sense, and the generally good picture I got of the entire subject from a week of book-grinding gives me hope for Equity & Trusts, the one GDL component which I don’t feel I have any grasp on (though I share this with several classmates and, seemingly, the tutor.) We adjourned to the pub; I know I have far too little contact with the GDL crowd, but they’re still great fun, and I will miss them a lot when all this is over.

Right, week off is over, back to the grind…

* Until last year, where Louis and I basically taught ourselves the entire Peninsular War (writing some 40,000 words of thoroughly obscene notes in the process. I’m hoping to repeat this with E&T.