Applying to study at CSLS
Applications for the 2012/13 academic year will commence from September 2011. Admissions information and application forms for 2012/13 will be published via the Admissions website (http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/index.html).
Information for Prospective Applicants
The Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (CSLS) welcomes students who wish to pursue research in any aspect of socio-legal studies, broadly defined. Your research work may lead to an MSt, MLitt, or DPhil degree. If you wish to join the Centre, you need to be interested in thinking about the links between law and society. Every member of staff in the Centre has expertise in a field other than doctrinal law, such as anthropology, jurisprudence, political science, psychology or sociology. Between us we can offer supervision of projects in most areas of socio-legal studies. We appreciate applications for theoretically informed empirical research projects as well as theoretical socio- legal inquiries.
You do not need to identify a supervisor, even tentatively, before you apply. A firm decision on supervision is taken only after a formally accepted student has actually arrived to begin the research degree.
The research proposal should take the following form. The maximum length should be two pages for the MSt or Mlitt, and three pages for the DPhil. As to content you should address the following points:
• The main research question to be answered, or the key research puzzle to be analyzed and explained.
• The theoretical perspectives that will inform the proposed research and the socio-legal debates that will be drawn upon.
• The nature of the evidence that you hope to examine in order to support or refute the main argument of your research.
• The way in which you will collect and use the evidence. You need to be able to describe the sources of the information or data (if any) that you will need, the techniques that you hope to use to collect it, and the methodology through which you will link your data to your theoretical perspective(s) and thereby interpret your data and use them to support or refute your argument.
It is an established practice at the Centre to interview all short-listed candidates for further clarification of the proposal. The interview is either conducted in person if the applicant is available to attend a meeting in Oxford, or by means of a conference telephone call if the applicant is abroad. Applications that are recommended by the Centre staff are then considered by the Graduate Studies Committee of the Faculty of Law before final approval.
When applying to study at the Centre you will be asked to identify the college (s) that you would prefer to join. To assist you with the choice, the University website provides extensive information www.ox.ac.uk. There is no problem if you have no particular preference; the Graduate School will make an allocation automatically once you have been offered admission.
Students finance their fees and living expenses in different ways. Many people rely upon their own savings or support from their family. Others have sponsorship from banks or other businesses or scholarships from foundations or grants from governments. It is not possible to successfully hold down a full-time paid job to produce the necessary income while undertaking a research degree at the Centre. The University imposes an upper limit of six hours per week on part-time work because that is the maximum amount that anyone can manage in practice if they wish to remain an effective student.
How to apply See Applications and Admissions procedure
Entry requirements: A good command of written English is essential in all degrees, and the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies therefore makes it a precondition of admission. If English is not your native language, you are required to submit English language test results of the higher level as detailed in Applications and Admissions Procedure. You must supply your test result with your application.
Students are selected for admission solely on the individual merits of each candidate and the application of the relevant selection criteria. Students must submit a full CV including academic grades translated into English, an outline of their proposed research proposal and one to two samples of their written work (depending on the course)
Three academic references are also taken into consideration. Candidates for a research place at the Centre should have, or expect to obtain, a good honours degree in Law or in one of the Social Sciences. The procedure and criteria for admission are as for Law.
Average number of applications per year 72
Average numbers admitted per year 6
Once you have applied, please do not contact the Centre to enquire on the success of your application- you will be contacted by the Graduate Admissions Office in due course.
If you have any further queries please contact Professor Denis Galligan, the Director of Graduate Studies for the Centre (denis.galligan@csls.ox.ac.uk).
