LSE Recommendation Letter Example: Law student vague between commercial and human rights (Score 93)

To the Admissions Committee MSc Law and Regulation London School of Economics and Political Science I write in support of the applicant's application to the MSc Law and Regulation programme at LSE. I supervised the applicant during an independent research paper in which they submitted weekly methodology memos over the course of a term. That sustained, iterative contact gave me a clearer picture of their analytical development than a single assessed piece would have done. The research paper sat at the intersection of regulatory theory and commercial law, and the applicant had arrived at the topic from a general LLB background rather than a specialist regulatory track. What I noticed early on was that they were genuinely uncertain about where their argument should land — the initial memos oscillated between a human rights framing and a commercial regulation framing without committing to either. That indecision was not a weakness in itself; the problem was that the methodology was being shaped around whichever framing felt more persuasive that week, rather than the framing being chosen first and the method following from it. I flagged this directly in my written comments on the third memo, and the applicant's response was instructive. Rather than defending the drift, they came to the next supervision meeting with a written note setting out the two framings side by side, identifying what each would require evidentially, and explaining why the commercial regulation angle gave them a more tractable causal claim. That kind of structured self-correction — done without prompting beyond the initial critique — is not something I see from every student at this stage. A second moment that stays with me came later in the project, when the applicant was working through a section on regulatory design and drew on a comparative policy document to support a causal claim about enforcement outcomes. I pushed back: the document was descriptive, and the inference they were drawing from it was stronger than the source could bear. The applicant initially resisted — they felt the inference was reasonable — and we spent a portion of that session working through what 'reasonable inference' means in a regulatory analysis context versus a doctrinal one. By the following week they had rewritten the passage, qualified the claim appropriately, and added a methodological footnote explaining the evidential limitation. The willingness to hold a position under scrutiny and then revise it on principled grounds, rather than simply capitulating or digging in, reflects a kind of intellectual honesty that I think matters for postgraduate work in this field. On the question of analytical range: the applicant is more confident with qualitative and doctrinal material than with quantitative or empirical regulatory literature. During the project they engaged with some empirical studies on enforcement patterns, but their handling of that material was more descriptive than critical. This is a genuine gap, and I would expect the applicant to need to invest effort in the quantitative and empirical dimensions of a programme like LSE's MSc Law and Regulation. I do not think this is a disqualifying limitation — the doctrinal and theoretical foundations are solid, and the capacity to learn from critique is clearly there — but it is something the admissions committee should weigh, and something the applicant should address directly in their first term. In terms of written communication, the memos improved markedly across the term. Early submissions were sometimes over-long and under-structured; by the final memo the applicant was writing with real economy, signposting their reasoning clearly and distinguishing between descriptive and normative claims in a way that is harder to teach than it sounds. I support this application. The applicant has the intellectual seriousness and the methodological self-awareness that postgraduate regulatory study demands. The LSE programme's focus on the relationship between law, markets, and public institutions is a natural fit for the questions the applicant was genuinely wrestling with during our work together — not questions they had retrofitted to a programme description. Please do not hesitate to contact me if further information would be helpful.