Soton Equity and Trusts - alastairhudson.com

How to study for this module
1. University study and education is about developing yourself as an individual:
consequently, preparing for an examination requires you to learn how you personally
work best.
2. You should read in advance of lectures. You must prepare in advance of
seminars so that (a) you have consulted your lecture notes, all prescribed reading
and any background reading and (b) you must have prepared (ideally in writing)
answers to all of the seminar questions.
3. Your seminar should be in the middle of your preparation. It is very important
that as soon as practicable after your seminar that you settle your ideas for yourself
(in a final set of notes or whatever works best for you), because it is after the seminar
that you will understand the material best.
4. There is a lot of background reading referred to in Hudson’s textbook’s
footnotes and in that textbook’s bibliography. You can find commentary and so forth
from these sources, as well as in these Lecture Materials and the Seminar Materials.
5. It is not acceptable to attend seminars unprepared; nor is it acceptable to
take notes from the work of other students in seminars without having prepared
yourself; nor is it acceptable to plagiarise the work of other students or of other
people. This module is about ethics: it also requires that you understand the ethic
bound up with being part of a community of scholars.
6. You learn a lot about yourself in an intellectually demanding, technicallysophisticated,
content-heavy and yet surprisingly fulfilling module such as Equity &
Trusts. Your seminars are fortnightly: this does not mean that you only need to do
half as much work as for a module with weekly seminars. Rather you should expect
to have done between 15 and 20 hours preparation for each seminar.
7. Equity & Trusts is a complex way of thinking about and analysing factual
situations and theoretical concepts. You will find that it is not simply about learning
rules and regurgitating them. Rather this module is about understanding how
different arguments and different conceptual models can be deployed to reach
different conclusions on the same factual circumstances. These techniques take
time to assimilate and so you will need to read the cases, books and articles carefully
to absorb and to understand them.
8. The exam requires you not simply to record all the cases you know about.
Rather the exam requires you (a) to identify the relevant issues, (b) to set out the
relevant (possibly conflicting) legal principles, (c) to apply the various legal principles
in a structured fashion to the facts of any given problem or to address the issues
raised by an essay title, (d) to use those principles to argue your way to a conclusion
(or to reflect competing conclusions), and (e) to incorporate any relevant
commentary outwith the legal principles.
9. You will encounter ideas in this module which you will not necessarily
understand immediately. You must read them and think about them over and over
until you do. This is the character-building aspect of this module. Perseverance is
how you grow, it is how you learn, it is why people study for law degrees. While the
rest of the world wants things to be easier, smaller and dumber, equity is capacious,
intricate and subtle. Coming to terms with this module will be an intellectual challenge
for you.
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