 Hi, I'm Tom and I'd like to talk briefly about lectures and supervisions at Cambridge. Lectures and supervisions are essentially your main contact time with teachers for your studies, and lectures are particularly important because they give you a nice structure on which you can hang the content of your reading when you're going about preparing for supervisions. They're also a really useful opportunity for lecturers to provide you with real current analysis of current problems in the law so that you're up to date as you need to be for your supervisions. It's useful in Cambridge that the lecture programmes actually run parallel to supervisions, so the content that you cover in lectures broadly corresponds with the work that you're doing at that particular time for supervision work. In one sense, lectures vary in terms of style. Lecturers have different ways of presenting their material, and this is partly because it reflects the differences between subjects, but it also perhaps helps to keep you on your toes and prevents subject matter from becoming too repetitive that the style is varied between subjects. Lectures last for around 50 minutes and may involve presentational devices such as PowerPoints or often lecture handouts which are physically printed out by the law faculty and distributed to students. They're also available online which makes it easy to type onto the lecture handouts while you're going through the lecture so that you've got a nice coherent and comprehensive set of notes when it comes to supervisions. I've mentioned supervisions quite a few times, but I think it's important to clarify exactly what it is that they are, and supervisions are small group teaching sessions which you share with around two to three other students and one professor. They're a really useful opportunity to go over particularly difficult areas of the law, and they also give you an opportunity to talk to a leading expert about the work that they do on a sort of small group basis. So it's a really useful opportunity to pick their brains and see what they think about a current problem with the law. It's also a very useful opportunity to learn from the other students and very often students will get together before a supervision and talk through some of the work so that they know roughly what it is that they're going to go over in that session and so that they're prepared for the questions that might arise in the course of the supervision. Supervisions are dictated by a set of reading requirements so you have a reading list that you go through and make sure that you read through the textbook and often also involve some questions at the end of the sheet which will help to indicate where it is that you need to focus for the purposes of the supervision. You then might read through some of the basic structure of the subject and then move on to some of the questions to talk about how to apply that knowledge in an exam situation. It's particularly useful as I've said that the supervision structure mirrors the structure of lectures so that you've got broadly similar content in both and what that enables you to do is make sure that you can get as far as you can with a subject before the supervision in terms of reading and attending lectures so that the supervision is really a springboard for further work which really helps to get your understanding of the subject as high as it possibly can be before your examinations later on in the year. In addition, supervisions are useful because they give supervisors an opportunity to talk about points of policy and issues which may not necessarily be so explicitly referenced in the textbooks so whereas the textbooks may be more useful for some of the black letter subjects I think supervisions are particularly useful where you're going over points which maybe perhaps to do with social policy or different incentives that may or may not be useful in a particular area of law so it's a really useful opportunity to approach the law from a much broader angle. Above all, supervisions and lectures and the way in which teaching works at Cambridge is particularly useful as it pushes you together with experts in the field and really gives you an opportunity to put your point of view on the table and have it considered seriously by someone who's a leading expert in their field. It's this unique combination of lectures and supervisions that makes Cambridge such a special place to learn law and for that reason I would very much recommend the experience.