The World's Toughest Law Course – The Oxford BCL | Dane Luo

Hello and welcome back to the Australian Law Student Podcast. I'm your host, Oliver Hammond, and in today's episode I had the pleasure of speaking with Dane Liu. Dane is an extraordinary individual who's recently returned from Oxford and is currently a tutor at the University of Sydney. At Oxford, he completed what is often considered the most challenging law degree in the Western world, the Bachelor of Civil Law or BCL. Dane not only earned a prestigious scholarship to pursue this, but he also distinguished himself by placing second in his graduating cohort at Oxford. During our conversation, Dane offers valuable insights into his academic journey, shares thoughts on the law, and provides practical tips for anyone aspiring to undertake the BCL. We also delve into the challenges he has faced along the way and explore his motivations that have driven him to his success. Just to preface as well, we apologize for the slight audio glitch after the 13th minute. However, this is certainly a discussion you don't want to miss. So without further ado, sit back, relax and enjoy the podcast. I'll start off with my first question, Diane. BCL is a highly respected qualification that attracts top legal minds from around the globe. In 2024, you're awarded for your efforts having the second best performance in the course. Could you take me through your academic journey and tell me what motivated you to pursue the BCL? I suppose. So I always knew when I was going through high school I wanted to do something involving politics or involving law and I got, I was very lucky to get the opportunity after the HSC to get to go do a law degree at the University of Sydney. So did that combined with economics and for a number of years I was actually doing quite well in economics. I thought I really liked economics and I ended up doing honours in economics and that was during the COVID years. But I think when I was doing economics I realized that that was not entirely for me, that whilst I enjoyed many aspects of it, I've still felt that my area of interest was really in the law. So I continued my law degree and then did honours in that as well as I was doing my law degree in that second-half. I basically did some work at the NSW Crown Solicitor's Office, so I worked as a paralegal there and then I was a summer clerk at Herbert Smith Freeholds HSF and that was really, really fun seeing how the law works in practice. And then after that I went and decided to do honours in law. I was supervised by a fantastic supervisor in Professor Emerata and Toomey and I did it on an area of constitutional, which is one that I really, really enjoy. Professor Toomey really taught me the ropes in terms of how to think deeper, how to think richer, how to think more critically about the law and where it is and where it should be going or where it is going. And I felt like that kind of gave me a really good step up to go, like I now want to go and specialized or think deeper or richer in this area. So basically what happened is that towards the end of my undergraduate LLB, I was looking for masters opportunities. I didn't think I was going to get into Oxford, Cambridge. I'd heard of like students who'd come from my undergraduate university, you said, who had done really, really well and had managed to get places at those universities. I was also a bit more interested in America at the time because they have a quite interesting constitutional or jurisprudence they've got that has massively exploded in a number of years with some really high profile major constitutional cases out of the Supreme Court of the United States. But I've put in a number of applications in for masters opportunities internationally and I was very, very lucky to be given a place at Oxford. And from there it was a matter of picking between my options and I decided that I thought Oxford would be the best place to go. It has a reputation of being the basic, has a reputation of being the hardest law degree in the common law world. I thought it'd be great to take on a challenge. Motivation for choosing that or was there sort of other factors? Did you get accepted into other programs perhaps even in in America? I mean, just thinking about it, yeah, you're right that the American sort of education has has really come to light. I think something that stands out to me is that Stephen, the current High Court judge of justice of Australia, he's, he was educated at Harvard. And so, yeah, I mean, what sort of goes into sort of the considerations around choosing your sort of the program? Yeah. So yes, well, Chief Justice Kagler went to Harvard and he's and then Justice Edelman on the High Court of Australia went to Oxford for the default. I guess a major consideration that you don't actually think of immediately is about cost because these programs when you go overseas, you're actually an international student and, and the costs are quite, it was actually quite a shock to me. So, you know, in Australia as a domestic student, you don't really think so much about money. You know, you can just put it on hex, you just press a few buttons and you don't have to think about it until you earn over the particular threshold. And then you're, oh, I'll start paying stuff back. But how it works in those international universities is that unless you have some kind of scholarship or funding that comes through, you're actually kind of, you're often required to pay upfront what is quite a, a really, really significant amount of money. Kind of what informed me about where to go was not just, you know, where would I be able to do the kind of subjects I want to do. I was at that point actually thinking I didn't want to just do constitutional law, public law. I wanted to also do a bit of commercial law as well. And that's also because I, after I graduated, I had a fantastic experience working with Justice Hammerschlag, the Chief Judge in equity at the Supreme Court of NSW, who for many years was the head of the commercial list and has a very strong commercial law background. And working with him was just Absolutely Fabulous. But it also made me realize, you know, maybe I can actually try different areas of law. I shouldn't pigeonhole myself into an area of law so quickly. So Oxford having a really strong reputation in commercial law, one of those big subjects being commercial remedies, which I did end up taking. And as well as the fact that I had managed to get what was quite a lucrative scholarship in the Peter Cameron Sydney Oxford scholarship. That was one that was awarded to UCID students who take on the BCLI. Just thought these things all kind of came together and but Oxford BCL kind of became the right option for me. Yeah, yeah. I think there's also a little that sounds like there's a level of pragmatism, I think in relation to these sorts of programs. I suppose focusing a little bit more on the details of perhaps people who would like to do the BCL. Let's start off with some of the prerequisites. What's your academic transcript looking like in order to sort of be offered a place at one of these institutions? What's your, I suppose, are there certain subjects that they look at perhaps more in depth? I mean, you also mentioned, I suppose perhaps your relationship with supervisors and intruders and that's that sort of thing. Is that also important in terms of academic references focusing the academic prerequisites? Yeah. So I guess now that I've actually kind of been to Oxford, kind of seen it. Of course, I think Oxford that they take about in the BCL, I think about 100 students a year and that comes from all common law countries. So it's not just 100 from Australia, it's about only about maybe 20 to 25 from Australia. Then they've got to take people from from the UK, people from Ireland, people from India, Pakistan, New Zealand, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Africa, everywhere around the world. Basically where there's where the common law system is, they can apply for to the BCL. So it's extremely competitive and you need a really, really strong transcript. But often people make, I feel like when people will speak to me or when people ask me about these things, they kind of make assumptions about what my transcript looks like. And they're like, and they're like, Dang, is it true that you only have HDS? And I'm like, no, that's not true. And that's, and that's really not true. I have my fair share of credits and I have passes on my transcript as well. But really what they're, I guess they're looking for is making sure you're ranked high in the cohort. So I mean, I don't know, I guess like every university has like a different way of doing things. So you said as a WAM system, other universities do like AGPA, some give like letters like ABCD or a plus or a star or whatever. So really I guess what you're kind of doing when you're applying as an international student is you're really trying to show you're in the upper ranges of your cohort. So, so ideally your rank would be something that'd be quite high relative to other students that you graduate with. And then the other one that I think is also extremely important, particularly for Oxford, are your references. So for the Oxford BCL, you need to submit 3 references and they prefer if they are all academic references, which is often a good hit. Whenever I speak to students who are still in uni. It's actually a really important time now to actually think about, you know, making sure you're building relationships with professors, getting to know them, speaking up in Class A little bit so that later when you ask, ask them, Hey, can I, can you please be my reference? They'll have, they'll have something interesting to say about you. So references are really, really key in, in the BCL and they and they make quite a difference. Really, your reference should be saying whether you can manage a heavy workload, whether you can think critically, whether you can engage with different viewpoints and things like. That yeah, OK, OK. And I suppose moving on in relation in terms of the application process, I mean, you, you mentioned previously that there's, there's an element of a personal statement. What are you sort of including in that and the sort of reasons that you want to do the BCLI mean? I imagine you probably can't just write something like, you know, I want to do the BCL because I think Oxford's cool or something like that. So what's the sort of process behind that? Yeah. So Oxford from memory revise A500 word personal statement. And I think the guidance is that for the BCL, the personal statement is kind of a bit more secondary. So you dismiss your CV, you just submit a writing sample of 2000 words, you've got your three references that are there. And then your personal statement is just kind of something that comes at like, you know, it's kind of there and looked at maybe when they're like just doing the final selections, like deciding whether, but whether you get a full offer or you're on the reserve list, whether you're on the reserve list or if you've been unsuccessful. So I think when they're like doing final decisions, they might look a bit more of a personal statement, but really the focus on the other statements and documents that you've got to put in. And I think the really key thing with the personal statement, I mean, I guess I can kind of just tell you what I did. I put on there that I wanted to do, to do the BCL because I felt like there weren't many opportunities to do electives at USID. So USID is, I think until I think, I think they're currently undergoing some changes at the moment with respect to the curriculum. But one of the things with USID is that they had like the least number of electives compared to any other law school in the country. So I think that we, we had someone did work this out and they, and they, and they, and they showed it. So I said, OK, I guess I kind of wanted to, to do some electives so I can specialized a little bit more in certain areas. I was also interested in working with the constitutional law and admin law faculty at Oxford. And what had happened was that two years before I applied, there was a major constitutional law decision called Miller, which was about a bit of a weird power, prerogative power, called the power to prorogue the Parliament. And it was about whether Boris Johnson legally had acted lawfully when he gave advice to prorogue the Parliament for what was an extended period of time, for a long period of time immediately before Brexit was about to occur, when Parliament was still looking carefully and scrutinizing those constitutional changes. And there was quite a proliferation of academic work that came out of that space. That was very interesting to me. And I said I really wanted to go do that. And I guess the last thing I said was something to say that I would find it interesting to look at things from a comparative perspective. And that was a great thing that I realized at Oxford because you bring you really are bringing people from many, many different common law countries. And on top of that, there's the Magista Urus or MJA, where they bring people from a civil law background. So you often get students from from mainland Europe and they bring a different perspective as well. So particularly some of the courses that I was able to sit in on or go to, you say, people bring in completely different perspectives on all kinds of things, particularly on even on aspects of administrative law and constitutional law, many differences in human rights and equality law, which I got to sit in a few classes for. So that all kind of makes the cohort richer. It makes the discussions more interesting and I think it makes a degree one that is quite attractive. I. Suppose you also mentioned a little bit about costs. Before speaking on that, is there some numbers that you can give in relation to the cost? And then also, I suppose with the scholarship that you also mentioned, what's the, what's the sort of time that people need to be start, start to think about scholarship scholarships and, and, and what are some notable scholarships that people can go for? Yes. So, so basically the cost is quite exorbitant. It cost, I think it costs this year 45,000 lbs for an international student's tuition fee, which when you put that in Australian dollars at the moment is about 90,000 Australian dollars, which is just a really, really gigantic sum. I was also living in college and I was I guess enjoying Oxford life and I found that that cost about another 25,000 Australian dollars including travel. So the whole year was, you know, it it, it quite quickly got to somewhere over 110 thousand $110,000 Australian dollars. So it's a really, really big thing. And I I didn't come from a particularly wealthy family, so I kind of had to look for scholarships and funding. There are some other Australian specific scholarships such as the Monash Scholarship and the Ramsey scholarships, which are not Oxford tailored but but do support international postgraduate studies. And there's quite often a BCL student who goes on there at my University of the Peter Cameron Sydney Oxford Scholarship, which gave 60,000 Australian dollars and was incredibly helpful. And then on top of that, there are a number of others within the colleges and the law faculty at Oxford. So the colleges also have a pool of funding, and the law faculty also allocates funding to students from there. Mm hmm. Well, and so with the college system over there, did you find that a much more different academic experience I think to Sydney? Oh, very, very different. Yeah. I I was actually quite surprised at how colleges operate. So they're actually, they operate a bit like houses within like Hong. Yes. So like it, it, it basically your college is like every, so every staff member, every academic, every student must be a member of a college. And your college provides, can provide, often provides you with accommodation and there's a dining hall where you go dine with people. They also have what's called common rooms and there's the JCR or junior common room for undergraduate students. If you're ABCL, you're usually part of what's called an MCR, a middle common room where you're with other graduate students. And, and it's really through your college that they organize lots of social events, sorts of parties, lots of all kinds of ways to kind of connect and have fun. So you actually, there's actually, I guess a bit of a second community. And it was great actually with this college community because sometimes you're balancing ideas at corridors as you're running, as you're at night or in the afternoon. You're also talking to one another. And it also encourages you to speak to people who don't do the same degree as you. So in my in my college, I got to meet with people who were doing medicine, who were doing science, who were doing archaeology, who were doing all kinds of things that were probably more interesting than laws. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can only imagine, I suppose, the, the, the studious nature of, of somewhere like Oxford, like again, one of those institutions that's so I suppose established and has that academic culture. Is that something that you felt as well over there? Definitely. I think there is definitely a difference between how we operate in Australia with teaching law and how Oxford operates for teaching law. So just give you some examples, two that come to mind straight away at when I was at the University of Sydney, almost all of my assessments for at least all my priestly 11 and most of my subjects were assessed by problem questions. So you know, you had the whole kind of course assessed and two or three problem questions with issues from all over the course scattered in a problem question. That was not the case at Oxford. In Oxford, often you would do say 15 topics for the BCL and then in the exam there would be 8 questions and then you kind of have to choose three. And they were assessed in essays. So what that kind of encouraged you to do was it really encouraged you to specialized in certain things so you could strategically not do everything and you just choose the ones you're actually interested in and to revise for exams. That was something that. Wasn't. Sydney, yeah, Sydney, you just had to be across all the content, really know all the issues or potential issues that could come up in a problem question, question. And another way, I think it teaches very differently between the BCL and my time during the LLB in Sydney was that in the BCL there are no lectures. Hmm. Well, and you're done really very much by seminars where you're kind of given a reading list, you kind of are expected to really prepare and read ahead in class. And you go there and you have a debate and some of my favorite classes where we would go in and, and, and the academic leading the session would say, all right, we've got, you know, case X and now who agrees with it, who disagrees with it? And then you have a bit of a discussion and a debate and the academics join in and there is a really robust discussion. And then on top of that, tutorials are significantly smaller. So high tutorials where there were only name one other person with an academic for an hour and these were really small tutorials for you to prepare an essay in advance. And you go there, you speak about your essay, you defend your essay, and then you get to ask the academic with some questions. So it was really, really interesting, a very, very different experience, very different to what I had in my undergrad. I can only imagine then we're we're approaching the end of the podcast. And So what that means is that we ask our standard questions that we ask all our guests for our listeners to get to know you a bit better on a personal level. So I'll start off with the first question. What was your favourite subject in law school, whether it be at Sydney or during the BCL and and why? I actually would say my favorite subject in law school, which some people won't say to the subject, was really doing research. So my honours thesis for my undergrad and my dissertation for the BCL, I, I really love this idea of where I got to choose my own question and then and then really just work through it and realizing that I chose a really hard question and she shows it an easier question. But, but really getting having that time working one-on-one with an academic and thinking really deep into the law with the different angles and things. It's just, it's the idea of having the time to do it and then putting together a really what was a 12,000 word piece of work, one that I was really, really proud of at the end. That's great. That's great. Secondly, do you have a book or a movie that's significant to you and one you'd recommend to students? Oh, I, I, I do I I, it would. One of the movies that I thought was most moving to watch was Lincoln. Which was about President Abraham Lincoln and his actions during the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery in America. That was a really moving movie The first time I watched it. And then subsequent times I've watched it, I've actually been looking and identifying a lot of political tactics and thinking a lot about what Abraham Lincoln did to bring people together. Remembering that to change the Constitution in America, you need a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress and you. And that was certainly not something that is easy to do by any stretch of the time, by any stretch, either today or back then. Where, yeah, I imagine that that that that life I suppose is, is something that I think a lot of people perhaps don't get to reflect as much I think in Australia. So that's a great, great suggestion. Moving on to the last question, what's 1 habit you believe has been pivotal to your success in the legal field? It, I, I think it has, it has probably been my diary. So I, I guess you might say I'm a bit traditional. I have a hard copy diary. Yeah. And I, I, I've, I've experimented with like my calendar app and everything and it never works. But I am very, very particular with my diary. When I do get busy, I use that diary to really plan out my day. Yeah. And there's something about writing it out, you know, when you're changing it, putting a line through it, substituting things in it, and you're actually able to see like quite an evil. Yes, Yeah. And then taking notes at the end of the day about what I thought, what I did, what was good, what was bad. And it was interesting because when I was again, doing my research for my faces and my dissertation, I would often sometimes go look back and like, oh, I had that idea from like two months ago and be like, oh, OK, great. Absolutely. I forgot about that. So. So yeah, that's been a good habit. It's good to write something. Is that a skill that you developed over time, or was that something that you can instantly do during high school or when you? Developed this year six teacher and just all do it and I Remember Me made on like this is so silly you know we would yeah six but I did it in year six and then my school my high school gave us free Diaries from year seven or year 12 and we actually really used it particularly in years 10/11/12 and then I just got into a habit and now I have to use. It. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, I would be here on time if I. Didn't well, no, that's great. That's great. Thank you so much. Well, Diane, that's about all the time we have for today. So thank you so much for joining me today and I wish you all the best for the rest of the year. Thank you so much, so much. Thank you.