Magister Juris

Magister Juris (common abbreviations include MJur, M.Jur., Mag. jur. and mag.iur.) is an academic degree in law awarded by some universities.

The Magister Juris is a one-year master's level course offered at the University of Oxford. It is a postgraduate degree requiring a previous undergraduate degree in law for admission, and is thus comparable to an LL.M. With the Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL), it is normally seen as the most highly regarded taught masters-level in the common law world. Over more than a thousand of applicants, up to 45 students are normally admitted to the MJur each year.

Oxford's Magister Juris and BCL are the same degree except that students whose undergraduate law degree is from a common law jurisdiction receive the Magister Juris, whereas students from a civil law background are awarded the BCL, although BCL and the MJur students are drawn from the same pool of applicants and share the same classes.^[1]

The BCL and MJur are the only taught graduate courses in the world which make use of tutorials as a central part of their teaching (as well as the seminars and lectures more generally used on LLM and other masters courses). The tutorial is an intensive discussion between a tutor and typically two or three students, providing an opportunity for students to present their ideas and discuss their work with leading academics. It is this level of access to some of the best known teachers and researchers across a wide range of legal subjects which perhaps more than anything distinguishes the BCL and MJur from their LLM counterparts.

Teachers at the Magister Juris include legal philosophers Leslie Green, John Gardner, John Finnis, private lawyers Stefan Vogenauer, John Cartwright, public lawyers Paul Craig, Sandra Fredman and Nicholas Bamforth.

Historically, German law students did not receive any academic degree upon completion of their curriculum. Instead, after usually four or five years of study, students would sit their First State Examination (Erstes Staatsexamen) in Law, which was administered by the ministry of justice of the respective state, not the university. More recently, however, some universities have begun to award their students a Magister Juris upon passing the First State Examination, in order to indicate the equivalence of the education to a master's degree in other disciplines. Examples include the universities of Cologne^[2] and Constance^[3]. Other German universities are awarding the Diplom-Jurist to their law examinees, following the same principle.

Austrian law students are usually awarded a "Mag. iur." after completion of their curriculum. Despite of the Bologna process Law is one of the studies, that still stick to the traditional Austrian system without a bachelor degree and a Magister Juris as the first academic degree.