Failed PHD student sues Cambridge University

Chocolatelovinggran

I'm with Barleyfields. This person has seems to have chosen the wrong career if he cannot defend his Viva.
Has he thought of library work?

You do not want people like he appears to be working in a Library. At public level there is an enormous amount of social interaction and helping people.

In academic libraries similar skills are required, plus considerable computer system understanding.

I'm with Barleyfields. This person has seems to have chosen the wrong career if he cannot defend his Viva.
Has he thought of library work?

Very true. And I doubt he would get many instructions for advocacy if his difficulties are as bad as he claims.

Barleyfields

Barristers have to be able to think on their feet NonGrannyMoll, and respond to and challenge evidence given in court as it emerges rather than being given time to think and have everyone speaking in a manner which suits them. Arguing the case for his own thesis with academics should have been a piece of cake for him if his thesis had merit. Maybe it didn’t..

He seems to be, as I said after reading the link from his Chambers posted by FlitterMouse, a collector of academic qualifications - and a bad loser.

Court cases would take longer than ever if everything had to be repeated carefully so one of the barristers could mentally retrieve the words or information that he needed in order to answer.

There's enough of a backlog as it is.

Barristers have to be able to think on their feet NonGrannyMoll, and respond to and challenge evidence given in court as it emerges rather than being given time to think and have everyone speaking in a manner which suits them. Arguing the case for his own thesis with academics should have been a piece of cake for him if his thesis had merit. Maybe it didn’t..

He seems to be, as I said after reading the link from his Chambers posted by FlitterMouse, a collector of academic qualifications - and a bad loser.

Yes Allira - think it's fixed in his character, he can't see things as others do.

He has an inflated sense of his own importance.

Something in his mind has grandiose ideas and blames others - but not willing to resit something apparently much wanted - going on for years - he's clearly not suited for what he wants to do but cannot see it - sad really.

Oh, do give over. Barristers have to use their brains and their mouths, in many different situations. Hard though it is, sitting in a room of 6 academics for an hour or so, answering questions on his own work (which he should have known inside out by that stage) requires much less articulacy than doing a barrister's job day in day out. A viva voce has to be tough, as does the thesis, otherwise we could all be awarded Doctorates (so why not just give them out to everyone when they leave school, thus cutting out the tricky bit in between?). But then, there'd need to be a different way of proving ourselves capable of getting responsible jobs (lucrative or not). The academic system can only dumb down so far before it starts to be pointless.

Robert the Bruce and the spider -
If at first you don’t succeed sue , sue and sue again? (And claim unlawful discrimination)
Added to which would you want a man like this acting for you in court? I think not.

What a dreadful example to set to our young people today.

X post.

I smell kippers.

“Mr Meagher, who first qualified in New Zealand in 2016, was called to the Bar in England and Wales in November 2018

He applied for appointments as a deputy district judge in both 2021 and 2022 – for which he needed five years’ post-call experience – but claimed he had been told by a member of staff at the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) that his experience in New Zealand would count. The staff member denied this.”

Digging a bit, there is lots more stuff online about this man and not just the matter of the doctorate.

There was an employment tribunal last year. I am not going to study all 23 pages of the judgement but it seems to be a claim of victimisation, about not getting jobs he’d applied for, those jobs being applications to become a judge.

My eye was caught by this paragraph:

Despite pleading in his claim form that he was eligible to be recruited to posts that he applied for … by the time of the preliminary hearing before me, the claimant accepted he was not eligible to be recruited to any of the roles he had applied for.

Here if anybody does want to wade through it

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66d9b3872bc43c72b08264f2/Mr_Jacob_Meagher_v_1._Judicial_Appointments_Commission_2._Mr._Ian_Thomson_3._Ms_Sophie_Austin_-_2212310-2023.pdf

Normally a doctorate in law would be an LLD. Strange that that wasn’t his choice. But the whole thing is strange and how silly of him to publicise his failure to the whole world when he could quietly have tried again. Can’t take rejection.

PhD's in law are very rare. The majority of barristers - even KCs - do not have one.

I too find this tale very tangled and would like to know ore before I rushed to judgment.

This is interesting, I wonder if my challenge of being an older student who forgets words due to age (62) will mean I also get special treatment ie have extra time to “mentally retrieve the words or information that he needed in order to answer” when the time comes for me to do my Viva in approx 4 years (am 2 years in of a part-time PhD).

Worth a try!

Thanks FlitterMouse. You posted as I was typing (slowly). That’s very interesting. He seems to collect educational qualifications. I can’t imagine how the lack of a PhD would affect his career, and what promise of a (more) lucrative career he could have been given. I suspect he simply can’t accept failure, the fact that on this occasion he wasn’t good enough. If he is the tenacious advocate he claims to be, well obviously he fell short of that. His clients wouldn’t accept a substandard performance due to some disability.

Yes Smileless, it is puzzling. I also find it strange that he should be promised a career as a barrister if he obtained his PhD. He could only have been promised a pupillage (training contract), following which he would be self employed, though a PhD isn’t a pre-requisite. Who is to say that he would ever have succeeded in a career at the Bar? It sounds doubtful if he has problems with verbal communication.

Suing the university rather than trying again isn’t a clever move imho.

A viva voce is a very different kind of examination. The student has to 'defend' his thesis. I'd expect a barrister to be well up to this.
Nevertheless, it's a stressful prospect -and wonderful when the examiners tell you you've passed!

Well yes, I'd have thought so too FlitterMouse and yet he has qualified as a barrister .

I’m confused by this as this man is practising as a barrister. His chambers website says he was called to the bar in 2016:

1ec.co.uk/barrister/jacob-meagher/

but maybe not at the chambers he wanted as this article explains althought it says he was called in 2018:

www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.thetimes.com/uk/law/article/failed-phd-student-sues-cambridge-university-over-withdrawn-job-offer-fw39f06cc

While the ruling did not provide details­ of Meagher’s alleged disability, it noted that he had told the court that the university’s disability resource centre had recommended that the viva examiners follow guidelines to help him. These included asking specific questions, using the active rather than the passive voice and allowing him pauses and breaks to allow him to “mentally retrieve the words or information that he needed in order to answer”.

This suggests he is neurodiverse.

Needing language to be couched in such a specific way would make advocacy, cross-examination and the whole court process very difficult, wouldn’t it?

Without knowing what his disability is, it's difficult to comment but I would have thought that one that could make an oral exam more difficult, would be taken into consideration.

If resubmitting his thesis the following year would also require re taking the Viva Voce exam and he's unable to do so, I'm confused with regard to his carer choice as a Barrister as surely that requires a certain level of verbal articulation.

Without knowing all the details except those in the media I really don't feel qualified to comment.

I failed my PhD in that my thesis was not passed. The examiners required me to re-do it differently. It took me a month or two to get over the shock and disappointment but then I ended up writing something much more like I'd wanted to in the first place, before I was given bad advice. The re-written thesis was accepted without any problems and I'm much happier with it than the original version.

My only disability was being in my 60s!

I think this student has missed out by taking this course of action.