History of UCL Laws

Our heritage

Our rich heritage of legal learning and research reaches back to the very beginnings of UCL in 1826, when London University, as UCL was then called, was founded. The new University was provided with two chairs in the Law Faculty. These were filled in 1827, when Andrew Amos was appointed as Professor of English Law and John Austin as Professor of Jurisprudence and the Law of Nations. 

The two professors had very different approaches. Amos’ lectures, which were enormously popular with students, drew on his practice at the Bar, and were prompted by “the legal questions of the day, the occurrences of [his] own practice, [his] own casual reflections, or the varied circumstances of the class.” Austin’s painstakingly detailed and analytical lectures were less popular with students, but their importance was recognised by some contemporaries – such as the philosopher John Stuart Mill, who attended them - and they are now acknowledged as a fundamentally important contribution to the study of legal ideas.

In 1836 the University of London was incorporated, bringing together what was now to be called University College and King’s College. The University of London had the power to award degrees, and in 1839 three UCL students were awarded the first ever degrees in English Law – the Bachelor of Laws (LLB). They included John Quain (who would later become a judge of the Queen’s Bench) and John Carr (who would become Chief Justice of Sierra Leone).

Throughout the nineteenth century, the numbers of students slowly increased. Many of them came to UCL because it did not restrict entrance in the way that other universities did at that time. For instance, when in 1888 Eliza Orme became the first woman to obtain a law degree in England, she had been a student at UCL Laws.

At the start of the twentieth century, UCL, King’s College and the London School of Economics (LSE) agreed to pool their law teaching resources. The result was an inter-collegiate arrangement that lasted until the mid-1960s for the LLB, and until the early 2000s for the LLM (a postgraduate masters degree created in the 1920s). Another twentieth century landmark for the Faculty was the creation in 1946 of Current Legal Problems, an annual public lecture series published since 1948 and is still flourishing today, where lecturers address topics of current legal controversy in a way that is accessible to a general audience- continuing UCL Laws’ long tradition of engaging critically and openly with the law.

Leadership through the years

A history of our Deans

• 2022-       Eloise Scotford
• 2017-22   Piet Eeckhout
• 2008-17   Dame Hazel Genn
• 2007-08   Sandy Shandro
• 2002-07   Michael Bridge
• 1998-2002 Sir Jeffrey Jowell
• 1993-98    Dawn Oliver
• 1989-93    Bob A. Hepple
• 1981-89    Sir Jeffrey Jowell
• 1977-79    William E. Butler
• 1975-77    Roger W. Rideout
• 1973-75    Maurice Alfred Millner
• 1971-73    Bin Cheng
• 1969-71    E.H. Scammell
• 1967-69    J.A.C. Thomas
• 1965-67    Georg Schwarzenberger
• 1963-65    Edward Richard Hardy Ivamy
• 1961-63    E.C. Ryder
• 1959-61    Dennis Lloyd (later Lord Lloyd of Hampstead)
• 1957-59    R. Powell
• 1955-57    Richard C. Fitzgerald
• 1954-55    Glanville Llewelyn Williams
• 1939-54    George Williams Keeton
• 1937-39    Herbert Felix Jolowicz
• 1932-37    Sir Maurice Sheldon Amos
• 1930-32    A. Sabonadière
• 1926-30    James Edward Geoffrey de Montmorency
• 1924-26    G.H.J. Hurst
• 1912-24    Alexander Falconer Murison
• 1910-12    G.H.J. Hurst
• 1908-10    Sir John Macdonnell

A top-rated law school

Today, UCL Laws is consistently ranked as one of the top law schools in the UK. We have achieved the highest rating in the last four instances of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), and score highly across a range of student surveys and university leagues tables published over the previous five years.