Applicants for this course should have achieved a 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 2027 the Postgraduate Admissions Office (PAO) must receive final evidence of the applicant having met the academic condition by 31 July 2027. 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.
English Language Requirements
All applicants to the MCL programme who are not nationals of a country on the UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) ‘majority English-speaking countries list’ 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 the UKVI ‘majority English-speaking countries list’ or is in the final year of study for a three-year full-time bachelor's degree in a country on the UKVI ‘majority English-speaking countries list’ .
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 2027 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 2027 in order to be valid.
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 Corporate Insolvency). 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 comparative corporate governance, international merger control and the law firm as business, than a general master's degree can offer.
Competence standards are set for the MCL to identify the competences and abilities that students are required to demonstrate in order to successfully complete a programme of study. The competence standards relating to MCL courses are available on the Faculty of Law website . Please note there are distinct competence standards for MCL modules and for Deals because of the different methods of assessment. With respect to the LLM course MCL students take, the competence standards relating to LLM courses are available on the Faculty of Law website .
MCL students take the compulsory full-year Deals course and a full-year LLM paper from a selection of corporate papers on offer to MCL students. In addition, from a menu of one-term MCL-specific modules, MCL students take four. They usually take two in the first term of the course and two in the second term.
MCL students are informed of the class into which they fell for their Michaelmas Term module examinations in January and for their Lent Term module examinations in April. They do not receive precise marks or written feedback.
MCL students are entitled to submit practice written work for the full-year LLM paper they take. This work might take the form of reflective essays or timed exam-practice essays. Course convenors and lecturers can advise on topics, but the aim is to produce short pieces of writing which provide a concise, rigorous argument or a cogent analysis of the issues in question. Students then benefit from specific and individual feedback, and can thereby hone their legal writing skills.
There is not a dissertation option for the MCL.
All students write an assignment (which has a word limit of 12,000 words) during the academic year as the primary form of formal assessment for the Deals course.
Students are required to take an examination for each of their four termly MCL-specific modules and a separate examination for their one full-year LLM course. Details of the format will be made available to students who enrol in the MCL prior to the start of the academic year.