About the authors

by Helen Carr, Sarah Carter, and Kirsty Horsey

Skills for Law Students is an innovative online resource which covers all of the skills that law students need to understand and develop during the course of their law degree. It includes clear, practical advice on how to develop key skills as well as over 170 interactive activities to test progress and to help put the theory into practice.

Helen Carr

Helen studied law at university and then qualified as a solicitor. She practised for 12 years before starting a career as an academic. Her current post is as a senior lecturer with Kent Law School. Her specialism is social welfare law, particularly housing, and she teaches public law and property law to undergraduates. She has taught law to both undergraduate and post-graduate students including many non-law students and she has co-directed a Legal Practice Course.

She is a part time lawyer chair with the Residential Property Tribunal Service and she is also legal adviser to the Commissioner for the Social Fund. She worked for four years at the Law Commission as a member of the public law team working on the reform of housing law. She has co-authored a variety of law books, including Law for Social Workers published by Oxford University Press, Law and Supported Housing published by Legal Action Group and a commentary on the Housing Act 2004 published by Jordan's. She recently completed an MA with the Open University on social policy and criminology so has recent experience of the horror of exams and essays.

Sarah Carter

Sarah Carter was law librarian at the University of Kent from 1985 until she retired in 2006. She has been interested in electronic legal information since its early days. Her Lawlinks website is an internationally recognised guide to web-based legal resources and has received several awards. Much of her work has involved the teaching of skills to law students, both in the classroom and online. In the course of this she designed online resources for teaching legal skills, and became interested in the concept of sharing resources with other people and institutions.

She has written extensively on the subject of law on the internet and legal databases, as well as teaching (both as part of her job and freelance) and has given a number of conference presentations.

Kirsty Horsey

Kirsty studied law at university and then decided not to go into practice. Instead, she started a research Master's degree in Medical/Family Law - which quickly became 'too big', so was converted to a PhD. While researching for her PhD, she taught seminars to undergraduates at Kent Law School and became involved in the teaching and co-ordination of the VALUE programme for law, a scheme launched by the University of Kent to help struggling first year students get through the year and enter confidently into the second stage of their degrees. She also took over the running of the internal mooting programme, set up, ran and taught on the Foundation in Law course, for students entering the university (usually from overseas) without the requisite qualifications to begin degree-level study, and helped students set up an in-house student mentoring scheme.

She is currently a lecturer in law at Kent Law School, teaching Obligations 1 and 2 (contract and tort) to undergraduate students across all years, as well as some Family Law. Her main research interests still lie in the overlap of Medical and Family law, particularly in the area of assisted reproduction and she has co-edited a book on the review of the law in this area: Human Fertilisation and Embryology: Reproducing Regulation (Routledge-Cavendish 2006). She is co-author (with Erika Rackley) of the student textbook Tort Law (OUP 2009).