The study of law at the University of Cambridge began in the thirteenth century. The faculty sits the oldest law professorship in the English-speaking world, the Regius Professorship of Civil Law, which was founded by Henry VIII in 1540 with a stipend of £40 per year for which the holder is still chosen by The Crown.[1][2]
The BA Tripos undergraduate degree at Cambridge is intended to give a thorough grounding in the principles of law viewed from an academic rather than a vocational perspective.[3] The faculty offers the following postgraduate degrees: the LLM, the MCL, the MLitt, the MPhil in Criminology, the MPhil in Criminological Research, the M.St in Applied Criminology, Penology and Management, the M.St in Applied Criminology and Police Management, the PhD in Criminology, and the PhD in Law.[4][5] In addition, the faculty offers the Postgraduate Diploma in Legal Studies and the Postgraduate Diploma in International Law.[6]
Cambridge is unanimously ranked as the best law school in the UK by all major national academic league tables. It is currently ranked first by The Guardian,[12]The Times/The Sunday Times' Good University Guide,[13] and The Complete University Guide.[14] Since it started publishing its annual rankings for 2010, The Guardian has ranked Cambridge first six times (2010,[15] 2012,[16] 2015,[17] 2016,[18] 2017,[19] and 2018[12]). The Complete University Guide has given the top spot to Cambridge since 2013[20] and eight times in the last 11 years.[21] The TimesGood University Guide law rankings has Cambridge atop its league table since 2014.[22]
In 2021, THE ranked Cambridge as the world's second best university for law in its 2021 subject rankings.[23] In 2021, the QS World University Rankings ranked Cambridge as the world's third best university for law and legal studies.[24]
The faculty is housed in the David Williams Building on the university's Sidgwick Site in Cambridge. The Building is named after the university's first full-time vice-chancellor and professor of public law, Professor Sir David Williams.[25] The Building opened in 1996 and was designed by Lord Norman Foster of Thames Bank, who also designed the terminal building at Stansted Airport and 30 St Mary Axe (the "Gherkin" in London).[26] The building suffered serious acoustic problems (primarily due to a lack of consideration of acoustics in Foster's design), with its form amplifying any noise from the lower levels and causing significant disturbance at higher levels, not least in the library.[27] This was fixed in 1999 with the installation of a glazed acoustic screen, separating quiet areas from noisy ones. Other issues still remain, with the toilets in the building frequently being out of order due to plumbing issues. Additionally, due to an excessive focus on the design of the study spaces, the toilets appear to have been an afterthought, being unbearably small and cramped.[28]
The David Williams Building contains the university's Squire Law Library, together with offices, lecture and seminar rooms and common room facilities.
The interior of the faculty building
Squire Law Library
The Squire Law Library, which occupies the majority of the first, second and third floors of the building, is a dependent library of Cambridge University Library.[29] It contains one of the three largest legal collections in the UK with more than 180,000 volumes. The collection is very strong across UK law, the law of other major common law countries (the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand), international law and the law of the European Union, France and Germany. There are, additionally, smaller collections for the law of many other countries. The library provides its users with access to many major legal databases.
The library was founded in 1904, at first with only 8,000 volumes,[30] although this soon increased. In 1934, together with the Seeley Historical Library, it moved to the Cockerell Building on Senate House Passage, previously the home of the University Library built in 1837-42. The Squire took over the whole of the Cockerell Building on the construction of James Stirling's building for the history library in 1968. With the Squire's own move in turn, its former site became the library of Gonville and Caius College.
Most individual colleges also have a smaller law library of their own, while the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law has its own library composed of international law books and other related materials.
Societies
There are a number of groups and societies based around the Faculty of Law:
