St Andrews is a tough place to escape from. Anyone who has visited will feel the keen pull of the sea air and the weight of excellence that permeates the university. Leaving becomes even more difficult when your dissertation supervisor suggests you should consider the MLitt. The reality was I’d fallen into the study of legal cultures and practices in my third year and could not think of doing anything else after that first module.
The MLitt offered me, and my contemporaries, the opportunity to explore what interested us. I grappled with the Byzantine, Legal Realists and even the local police use of photography. The structure gave me regular interaction with people of such diverse interests that I came to class excited to hear how their research was going. I vividly recall the presentation of a particularly complex diagram tracing the schisms of the Church.
The benefit of distance provides me with the space to conclude that the MLitt was essential not only to my intellectual, but my personal development. I was encouraged to experiment and to follow my nose. Perhaps I took Professor Humfress’ comments that we were all detectives a little too much to heart; since leaving St Andrews I have been a detective for the Metropolitan Police, specialising in homicide investigation, for the better part of the last eight years. That chapter will come to a close in September when I take up a place on the Bar Practice Training Course at the Inns of Court College of Advocacy.