PROCEDURAL LAW UNIT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NICOSIA

Laura Eve McBride, Magdalen College, Second Year Undergraduate, BA Jurisprudence, Remote working

Work Projects

I worked on various projects for the

Procedural Law Unit, both large and small, in

their research regarding how the law of

procedure relates to the ability to dispense

justice across the globe. One of the smaller

projects was the translation and editing of a

brochure document from Greek to English, which had to match the original Greek

counterpart and was to attract interest from more English speakers.

Another was to research and find possible EU grants that are available for application, which

involved looking through a large database and finding a suitable grant as well as potential

partners for an application, which was a separate database. My next task was to find a

suitable case to write a case note on for publication in a law blog.

I followed the direction of my supervisor and found a suitable case, and had to read it in a

lot of detail in order to produce a suitable summary. I then wrote a summary and some

analysis, which was slightly difficult as this was an area of law I had no prior experience but

found super interesting and very practical for future career prospects.

My biggest project was working on a comparative research project, which took 2 weeks. A

team of academics have created a set of model procedure rules for Europe, and my job was

to compare the model rules to the current civil procedure rules of Cyprus (which were

brought into force in 1958 with few revisions from there) as well as the incoming rules in

Cyprus (which were released about a month before my internship commenced, and are due

to be adopted soon).

This involved a significant amount of research, background reading, and intense scrutiny of

the various different rules, in order to try and make a comparison between three very

different systems. The end result of this was to create a report to be built upon by the Unit

with even further research. This report ended up being 13 pages long, with discussion of all

three systems and how they relate to each other.

Daily Life

I stayed with a close friend in a city I had never been in before for the duration of the

internship, so I spent a lot of the weekends and free evenings exploring, enjoying the

nightlife, going to football games and going out for dinner.

I made sure to balance work with fun, working from desk or bed, with a constant supply of

tea or ice cream to keep me going. I also went out during the daytime to go work in

different locations, like cafes, which helped me both explore and work in a different

environment.

The internship was quite flexible, which meant that I could generally work when I wanted to

(within reason) so long as I produced sufficient work, and this really helped with the remote

aspect of it, especially as my supervisors were in a different time zone to me. I could work as

early or as late as I needed to, and it meant that there was the ability to enjoy my time in a

new environment while working on research.

could prove useful in the future.

Lasting Impressions

I enjoyed the experience, as I got to try out

an industry that I'd never had experience in

before, which is academia. I really enjoyed

the flexibility and the ability to research on

a project, structure it how I liked, and

produce a document at the end of it which

I developed my research and writing skills in doing so, as well as experiencing legal

documents in a new language and new legal system, which will be of benefit to me

especially on my year abroad and my future ambitions. It's given me a real insight into the

possibility of academia for me to get into, as well as other forms of research or analysis jobs

in my future career.