A few years ago, I attended some classes for an LLM module alongside an ILS graduate at one of the London law schools which people like to view as a backup option if admission to Oxbridge masters programmes don't work out for them. This gentleman and I were in a legal theory class together. Most of us agreed that his attempts to do the readings put in just about the minimum amount of effort required (and often less), his understanding of the readings was shallow at best and his contributions were, therefore, superficial and unhelpful (despite, per his own claims, him being among the top students at ILS).

His starting salvo in this legal theory seminar was rather unfortunate. He committed that most embarrassing faux pas - showing off to the teacher what he'd learned in his undergraduate jurisprudence class before the first seminar in this legal theory course had even started, speaking in the very vaguest of terms about the Hart-Fuller debate - vague enough to sound smart to the uninitiated from civil law jurisdictions, but also vague enough to leave his hearers (especially the more discerning ones) unsure if he actually knew what he was talking about. The teacher, an Israeli with the three juicy Oxford degrees of BCL, MPhil and DPhil under his belt and an enthusiastic proponent of Joseph Raz's ideas about how patiently to suffer fools in his class, was not amused (and showed it, with his usually cosmopolitan English pronunciation, which had only a hint of foreign accent, becoming much more gutteral for a few minutes). Over a period of 10 weeks, I think that would have ended up having an impact (how perceptable that might be is something we can discuss) (on a very small scale, in terms of sample size) on the perception of his uni, based on the fact that there were graduates from universities around the world, including two other Indians - one guy from DU (and me) - a Japanese who was on government scholarship from his country, an Albert Campion-style Brit (with many of the trappings, including the high voice, the ability to talk nonsense when he felt Like and the "piculiarly inoffensive countenance"), who liked to liked to pretend that his intelligence was 2/10 when it was more like 7 or 8/10, and a Mexican, all of whom did a lot better than our ILS friend (both in terms of classroom performance and, if my sources on the grapevine are to be relied upon, in the exam as well). Seeing as we exchanged LinkedIn profiles, I am pretty sure most of us saw the name of that guy's undergrad uni.

Does this represent the overall quality of ILS kids? Or was this guy an exception? What was he about - an unmotivated character who was hoping to achieve a job in the UK legal sector without doing the hard yards? Or someone who was having a year-long professional vacation after a few years of law firm life? Or maybe he just didn't like the legal theory class very much? Most of these questions I am not qualified to answer, because I didn't bother getting to know the guy beyond exchanging LinkedIn handles and a pleasantry once every couple of weeks. As for the last question, he did admit once that he regretted taking the legal theory class, that it was outside his chosen specialisation, that he'd taken it purely for fun and now found it a bit dull.

Take these observations as you will and please advise as you like.