33. Where Do We Go - Merle Morris

At this stage of the university semester, one moves quickly away from the 'need to understand the concept' idealism towards a more realistic, 'what do I have to write in the exam that would suggest I understand the concept'. With my many years experience of leaving study until the last possible minute, I've reached a level of comprehension that goes even beyond that; I'm into what I like to call the 'big brother law understanding'. Simply put, I've managed to condense each topic, containing 25+ lecture slides, 10+ cases and 30+ pages of text into a simple one liner that would understood by the average joe who watches Big Brother and actually thinks that it is engaging television.

Here's an example.

International law; topic 2: The United Nations & Other International Organisations
"The UN is a bunch of guys from every country who sit around and argue alot about how the world is going"

(Just as a side note, it’s a quite sad realisation when you realise that your entire knowledge of international law is based on episodes of West Wing. And your understanding of diplomatic immunity comes from Lethal Weapon 2. Trust me, that happened to me during my introductory lecture for this subject.)

Another method that surprisingly works is the application of my IT'ish skills to law. Here, I employ a simple IF statement to try to understand jurisdictional error and error of law on face of the record in regards to Administrative law;

DM = Decision Maker
UV = Ultra Vires
NJ = Natural Justice
JE = Jurisdictional Error

IF DM = Administrative THEN broad/narrow UV AND NJ = true
ELSEIF DM = Tribunal THEN broad/narrow UV = JE AND NJ = true
ELSEIF DM = Inferior Court THEN narrow UV = JE AND broad UV = Non-JE AND NJ = true
IF broad UV = Non-JE THEN IF on face of record THEN reviewable ELSE not reviewable
END IF

Obviously there is something to be said about actually understanding the whole concepts when studying law, but at this point of time, I'll go with whatever works.