Bristol students swap lectures — LLBer cracks medicine in a jiffy, while medic is baffled by contract law

A medic and a lawyer from Bristol University swapped lectures to find out which of the two notoriously middle-class courses was worse — and it seems law is just as hard and boring as we already knew it was.

The inquisitive first year students — namely, Ellie Drewry (pictured below right), who studies law; and Eleanor Hennebry (pictured below left), who studies medicine — took part in the social experiment to answer the age-old question: is law harder than medicine?

And the answer seems to be a resounding yes — not only is law confusing and boring, law students are pretty rubbish as well.

Taking on a LLB lecture — in what we are pretty sure is contract law — undercover medic Hennebry is blown away by the dryness of the subject. Four minutes into the lecture, she reports in The Tab:

Am I meant to be listening to the content? It’s already boring.

Law definitely doesn’t live up to its TV-court-drama-reputation, with a bemused Hennebry asking:

Where’s all the murder? This is just cases about shares fraud — and not cool fraud like The Wolf of Wall Street.

And it’s not just the course content that has the medic’s head in her hands — she’s particularly shocked by the lack of “banter” from the lecturer:

There are no Star Wars jokes or Shrek clips. I’m confused, this is so different from medicine.

By contrast, over in the medicine lecture, Drewry seems to be having a whale of a time. Star Wars jokes and YouTube clips aplenty, she was particularly underwhelmed by the difficulty of the course. Lecture over, she says:

I knew most of that stuff. I mean, don’t examine me on it, but it was pretty straightforward. Bristol is supposed to be the most competitive medical school in the country: I call bullshit.

Unfortunately, our medic is not having such an easy time trying to get her head around contract case law. Taking us through a commentary of what we think is Leaf v International Galleries, she describes the case’s outcome as “brutal”:

[The claimant] would have been so happy with his painting, I feel so bad for him (that’s the empathy we’re trained to feel kicking in). No such empathy from the surrounding lawyers.

Law students are just not, according to Hennebry, all they’re cracked up to me.

It’s not just their lack of sympathy: no one is in a suit, and no one seems to be talking to one another.

Over in the medicine lecture, Drewry paints the picture of a chatty, social year group, with one girl trying to flog hummus to her fellow students before the lecture started.

But, over here in contract law 101:

Everyone is spread out and sitting on their own or in pairs. I don’t like it. In our lectures, each group has their own claimed row and banter is flowing. In here, they all look sad.

She continues:

One guy is on what looks like a dating site, the social life is clearly not buzzing in law.

We’re not sure if it’s the competition for TCs and vac schemes, the competition for first class marks, or just a bad gene common to all law students, but we are a notoriously unsociable bunch (except at law balls, where we all love each other).

And it seems this Hunger Games stereotype is so true that even outsiders can pick up on it.

Forty-one minutes in, Hennebry is so horrified by the whole experience that she asks the same question we reckon every law student in that room wanted to ask:

What the fuck is happening? This is so boring.

So it’s official: even the formidable medics cannot hack the dreaded law lecture. Our lawyer agrees. Not impressed by her medic experience, she concludes:

Law is 100 per cent harder than this bullshit.

Legal Cheek votes for a third year lawyers vs geographers edition. Any takers?

Image of Ellie and Eleanor courtesy of The Tab.