Write an essay engaging critically with Siems’s views while relating the discussion to your own field of legal interest and/or prospective PhD thesis topic.

Read the following piece (available online and also on our unit’s Moodle webpage):  Mathias Siems, “Legal Originality” (2008) 28:1 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 147-164. Write an essay engaging critically with Siems’s views while relating the discussion to your own field of legal interest and/or prospective PhD thesis topic. Your essay should include examples to illustrate which way(s) of “being original” matter most in your chosen field. You may consider whether there are other relevant ways of ‘being original’ that Siems does not identify, or take any other critical stance you find appropriate. Your essay should be structured, written, and formatted as if it were an academic article you might submit for publication in a journal in your field. It should be between 5000 and 7000 words. Use Times New Roman or Arial size 12, 1.5 spacing throughout the text, and single spacing in footnotes. The essay should contain an anti-plagiarism declaration at the end stating that the work presented is entirely your own (which means also that you did not rely on AI tools to generate any relevant content) and that all contributions and texts are duly referenced. Your essay will be assessed both for the substance (and indeed originality) of its arguments and the quality of its writing.