Ruvi Ziegler at the 10th constitutional court review conference in Johannesburg

 Dr Ziegler has been keeping busy during his research visit to South Africa, under the auspices of the South Africa Research Chair in International Law (SARCIL)

Last Month, he participated in the 10th constitutional court review conference in Johannesburg, presenting a paper on ‘effective access to refugee protection in South Africa’ alongside Justice Kapindu of Malawi High Court (a conference report is available here).

In September, Dr Ziegler gave invited talks about “No Asylum for ‘infiltrators’: Israel’s Dysfunctional asylum system” at the Refugee Rights Unit, University of Cape Town and at the African Centre for Migration and Society, University of Witwatersrand.

He also chaired a panel at the ‘Beyond 50 and 10 beyond the rhetoric: international conference on the protection of forced migrants in Africa’ hosted by the centre for human rights at the University of Pretoria.

Former University of Reading student becomes solicitor for Blandy and Blandy LLP

A FORMER University of Reading Law student began this week as a qualified solicitor, after completing her training contract with leading Reading-based law firm Blandy & Blandy LLP, which also offices in Henley-on-Thames.

Sophie Clark gained A*AA in her A Levels at The Henley College in 2013, before going on to study Law at the University of Reading, where she obtained a 2:1.

Sophie was previously a pupil at Langtree School in Woodcote.

She has joined the firm’s busy and growing Probate, Tax & Trusts team, in which she spent 12 months of her training contract, and she will be based in Blandy & Blandy’s Henley-on-Thames office at 24 Thameside.

She said: “I applied for a training contract at Blandy & Blandy because of its fantastic reputation and I am delighted to be joining the firm’s leading private client team.”

“My experience of training here has been an excellent and enjoyable one and I am greatly looking forward to developing my experience as a solicitor at the firm.”

Partner Caroline Casagranda added: “Congratulations to Sophie on her qualification – we are very pleased to welcome her to our team and to our growing Henley office.”

Sophie has previously returned to both the College and the University to share her experience and insights with students considering a career in Law.

Blandy & Blandy is recognised as a top tier firm of solicitors in both of the UK’s leading guides to the legal profession, Chambers UK and The Legal 500, and recently celebrated its 285th anniversary.

Students presenting at the University of Surrey

On Monday 16th September 2019 2 University of Reading LLB students presented at a conference at the University of Surrey – “Towards Meaningful Partnerships“.

Finalist Krissy Hiu co-presented with Amanda Millmore about the staff-student partnership they were involved in to embed employability skills into a module, with a group of Law students collaborating with academics Dr. Annika Newnham and Amanda Millmore to design the assessments. She follows in the footsteps of her fellow undergraduate students who have presented this project at other conferences; Tom Fuller and Megan Bennett presented the project to the SEDA Conference in Belfast in May, whilst Jess Davies co-presented with Amanda at the Advance HE Teaching & Learning conference in Newcastle in July. The new module that they designed collaboratively (Children, Families and the State) will be running for final year Law students for the first time this autumn.

Meanwhile school rep and finalist Will Page presented the “Life Tools for Law Students” project at the University of Surrey along with Alicia Pena Bizama from the Student Wellbeing Service who runs the Life Tools programme and Amanda Millmore (School Director of Academic Tutoring). Will wanted to improve the wellbeing of his fellow students during his time as school rep in the School of Law and so collaborated with Alicia who runs the Life Tools programme university-wide and Amanda to develop a Law School version of the programme designed specifically to support the Law students and run within the School of Law.  Life Tools for Law Students will be running again in 2019/20 for all Law students, alongside the university-wide programme, following the success of last year’s pilot.