Content tips

Unfortunately, Constitutional Law is a subject in which there are no shortcuts. Examiners love to see a range of sources and examples: lectures, reading from the supervision sheet, and reading from beyond the supervision sheet. If Fiona Wilson Stark tells you to ‘build your learning in layers’, she is entirely right. Nonetheless, I think the advice in lectures sometimes errs. Last year we were told that rewatching lecture recordings would be a waste of time. I beg to differ. I remember being rather confused and disengaged by John Allison’s lectures on the Executive: they seemed very abstruse to me in Michaelmas. Then I revisited them in Easter and found that they answered essentially all the gaps that my revision was struggling to fill in.

Constitutional Law is a subject in which ‘process knowledge’ is pivotal. Stefan Theil once told us that “this isn’t the kind of content which you can learn in a week”. Even if the facts and the cases seem rudimentary and digestible, you’ll learn at least as much from the actual process of labouring through the supervision sheets. Reading Trevor Allan is not important for the facts or arguments you’ll glean, indeed most are rather simple when you boil them down to their basics, but his vocabulary and modus operandi are gold dust to any law student. ChatGPT can certainly distil your readings and give you a sentence to use in the exam, but I’m sceptical as to whether it can give you that process knowledge. However, lest you let Constitutional Law ruin your Christmas holiday, I venture that some omissions are allowed: the textbook is less useful than in other subjects, and you’d do better to re-watch the lectures or read everything Philip Murray has written on ouster clauses.

If you expected law to be a degree of precision and exactitude, Constitutional Law may disappoint you. Particularly the loose recourse to vague, amorphous constitutional principles is alienating in this regard. My advice is to throw the headline principles out of the window. Yes, these principles are important, but they are rather like newspaper headlines: useful for telling you what the story is about, but a poor substitute for actually reading it. Saying that a decision offends the rule of law, undermines the separation of powers, or threatens parliamentary sovereignty displays the same sophistication of argument as the average Sun headline. Conflicts between principles can be elucidated more clearly by considering their normative underpinnings. Everyone else will be explaining what they think the rule of law is, a task more appropriate for an encyclopaedia than a law exam. Instead, query to what extent these concepts are really capable of ‘direct application’. Isn’t it interesting that when these principles appear in the case law, they generally appear as a rhetorical flourish in the judge’s summing up? That suggests to me that underneath the headline principle there are a whole range of considerations which are capable of ‘direct application’, and these are more worthy of your time. In similar vein, constitutional scholarship is a field in which the proposition ‘it depends what you mean by sovereignty’ can sustain an entire academic career. I venture that anyone who rigidly asserts “Parliament is sovereign”, or “Parliament isn’t sovereign at all” would cause great offence in the Cambridge Law Faculty. Instead, dissect how far sovereignty really takes you in understanding the case law.

Revision tips

Unique to Constitutional Law is the fact that you’re allowed to omit cases that don’t make sense to you, and you never have to use them as evidence. Obviously the Millers can’t be omitted, nor can other Attorney General v Jonathan Cape if you’re writing an essay on conventions. Nonetheless, Malone v MPC never made sense to me, and I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.

I would avoid dropping topics for the exam. The pay-off is very low: ultimately, your knowledge is process knowledge. The factual content you need to know specifically for each topic is minuscule compared to the arsenal of process knowledge. If you’ve stayed on top of your supervision work throughout the year, it would be a waste to omit topics. Certainly have preferences, but don’t drop topics in toto, particularly since Constitutional Law is a subject in which cross-pollination is the rule, not the exception. Even should you decide against the PQ, the content is still highly versatile for essays across the course.

The word of the hour seems to be panic about the new exam format. For Constitutional Law, I wouldn’t fret. I’d focus on building a bank of versatile quotes within each topic, and having a list of cases that may be worth discussing in relation to each topic. It may also be helpful to have a couple of trigger sentences that remind you of a point that you know how to make. For example, pairing cases with concise critiques or opinions could be an effective tool.

Exam tips

Parliament may not be able to bind its successors. However, your introduction certainly should bind what follows. In my experience, extraordinarily simple, one-sentence introductions pay off, and allow you to adduce a paragraph which only popped into your head with five minutes left on the clock, whereas if you craft a detailed argument in your introduction, you may find that you’ve changed your mind by the end. A rule of thumb helpful to me in this regard is that my conclusion should be twice my introduction.

I have heard the rumour that the solitary problem question is a sound way to farm marks. I certainly don’t share this view: why burden your past paper practice by teaching yourself another skill? If you learn how to write three essays in forty-five minutes each, as you will have to do anyway, it’s hardly an imposition to write a fourth.

I would also, with caution, say that Constitutional Law is a paper in which word count does matter. It is extraordinarily hard to craft a compelling argument in less than 1,000 words, and I wound up writing nearer 1,400 per essay in the exam. Certainly, your words must relate clearly to the question, but I would err on the side of over-inclusion, rather than spending precious time revising what you’ve already written.

A final word of caution: stay clear of systematising your essay writing too much, particularly in Constitutional Law. It is tempting to think that there is a formula to a good essay. Saying what you think about a question is the organising principle of essay writing, and any formulae are only helpful to the extent that they help you say what you think. I would avoid being rigid about how long a paragraph should be, how many cases you should include in total, and the like. Particularly, avoid having any preconceived rules about how you’re going to answer questions: let the question lead you. Otherwise, your script may lead the marker to say “candidates are reminded to answer the question as it was posed, not as they wanted it to be posed”, the despairing chorus of every examiner’s report.