Life Of A Law Student's Guide To: Torts Law

Faith

Feb 1

And welcome back to another instalment of Life Of A Law Student Guide To...! Doing this series has been really fun (I promise that's not a lie!) so I'm excited to give you my next law guide. Of course, the title gives it away that this is going to be my guide to Torts Law.

So, this is another compulsory class that you will have to take and you need to be prepared because there is a lot of content covered in this class.

Generally, torts law focuses on wrongful acts, accidents or omissions that can harm other people. If that doesn't make a lot of sense now, then don't worry about it, when you start your torts class it will make more sense.

Some of the topics you may cover in a torts law class are:

land related torts (e.g trespass and encroachment)
nuisance (private and public)
negligence (Donoghue v Stevenson, this is a very importance case and it explains why I have a ginger beer image for this post)
deceit and misstatements
passing off
defamation (you might be required to read lots of interesting celebrity defamation cases)
privacy (e.g breach of confidence)
third-party liability

This class focuses on civil law and the point of this class is to help law students understand some of the most common legal rights and responsibilities private individuals (i.e regular people) have to each other. Yes, you read that right. Regular people still have legal responsibilities towards other people (e.g road rules are very relevant here!) so, this class sheds light on some of these responsibilities and rights.

After taking this class my main piece of advice is this: take really good notes of the cases you read! I remember reading and going through so many cases in this class that it did get a little bit overwhelming at times. Especially, when you start looking at negligence, there are a lot of important cases you'll be looking at when studying negligence so, make sure your notes are good! I've written a blog post about how to read legal cases and take notes (linked here) if you would like some tips.

So, this class is actually pretty fun and interesting, there are some great cases that you'll read but your workload can increase very quickly, so be prepared for that. Other than that, I hope this guide gives you a good summary of what your torts class would be like. Thank you for reading my blog post and I hope you have a lovely day.

Here are some of my previous Life Of A Law Student blog posts, from the first season.
Things I Wish I Knew Before I Applied To Law School
How To Read Legal Cases And Take Notes
How I Take Notes In Class (Online and Handwritten)
How To Write A Legal Memorandum/Opinion