Students who come on the course usually have little computer experience, but do have a good legal grounding. The LLM course numbers average around 20 per year of full-time students. This is a small enough group to get to know each other well, and there is no real sense of being isolated since being lab-based in the first semester students are thrown together and usually socialize together. There will be some more mature students and some will be overseas students. Some will have undertaken degrees in Scotland or England.
Most students undertake the course full-time.
Students usually fund themselves since it is very difficult to access any awards for the study of taught degrees. It is an unusual course for a law school in that the first semester is spent undertaking purely computer-based work. The reason for this is that we believe that no-one can really understand the law of the new technologies unless they understand those technologies. Many of the assignments now relate to building and designing web sites using, for example, javascript. Students will have the opportunity to develop their understanding of operating systems architecture through using both Microsoft Windows and Linux.