Corporate Law

Entry requirements

Applicants for this course should have achieved a UK First class Honours Degree.

If your degree is not from the UK, please check International Qualifications to find the equivalent in your country.

MCL enrolment is restricted to approximately 25 students, meaning competition for places is intense. The normal minimum academic entry requirement for law graduates seeking admission to the Cambridge MCL is a top 5-10% ranking in their class. In a UK university, this may equate to a First Class degree. Extra weight may be given to the performance in courses related to corporate law. Applicants will normally have a law degree, but those qualified to practise law who have a degree in another subject are welcome to apply.

Students who are currently undertaking legal studies who will graduate soon can apply before completing their degree. Successful applicants in this category are likely to have academic conditions attached to their offer. If an offer is subject to academic conditions, to join the MCL in October 2024 the Postgraduate Admissions Office (PAO) must receive final evidence of the applicant having met the academic condition by 31 July 2024. If potentially relevant academic results only become available after that date, it will not be possible for the applicant to be admitted to the MCL programme.

Months of entry

October

Course content

The Cambridge MCL is a nine-month taught master's programme commencing at the beginning of October each year and ending in June the following year. It is designed for students wanting to pursue further legal studies after completing their first degree in law, catering in so doing both to those intending to practise in the area of corporate law and to those considering an academic career. The MCL has been structured so as to combine academic rigour with a diverse and flexible curriculum, enabling each student to tailor their MCL course selection to their own specific requirements.

MCL students take a combination of full-year courses and one-term modules during the academic year. All students take the compulsory full-year MCL-specific Deals course, which focuses on the legal and economic structuring of corporate transactions. They also choose one full-year LLM paper from a selection of corporate papers on offer to MCL students (possible examples include Corporate Finance, Corporate Governance and International Financial Law). In conjunction with the full-year papers, students take four one-term MCL-specific modules, usually two in the Michaelmas Term and two in the Lent Term. The modules enable students to conduct a more detailed study of certain specialist areas of corporate law, such as shareholder litigation, international merger control and the law firm as business, than a general master's degree can offer.

Information for international students

ll applicants to the MCL programme who are not nationals of a country on the Postgraduate Admissions Office's ‘List A’ are required to take either the Academic IELTS English language proficiency test or the TOEFL English language proficiency test. The only exception is if an applicant has successfully completed a three-year full-time bachelor's degree within the last two years in a country on List A, or is in the final year of study for a three-year full-time bachelor's degree in a country on List A.

All MCL applicants who need to take an English language proficiency test must submit their test results with their course application or as soon as possible afterwards and by 1 April 2024 at the latest.

Applicants must obtain all of the required Academic IELTS or TOEFL scores in the same test sitting; multiple test results cannot be combined to meet the language requirement. Please note that we do not accept TOEFL MyBest™ scores.

Language test scores must be less than two years old by the start of the MCL course in October 2024 in order to be valid.