This is a nine-month taught master's programme commencing at the beginning of October each year and ending in June the following year. It is designed for students wanting to pursue further legal studies after completing their first degree in law, both those intending to practise in the area of corporate law and those considering an academic career. The MCL has been structured so as to combine academic rigour with a diverse and flexible curriculum, enabling each student to tailor their MCL course selection to their own specific requirements. MCL students are expected upon arrival to be familiar with corporate law and to be motivated to develop their expertise in this challenging area. Students who take the MCL should leave with a much enriched understanding of the topic. They will learn about areas of corporate law with which they were not previously familiar, will have an opportunity to reflect upon the theoretical and policy implications of the topic and will be challenged to think about the practical aspects of the subject in an academically rigorous manner. MCL students take a combination of full-year and one-term modules during the course. All students take the compulsory full-year Deals course, which focuses on the legal and economic structuring of corporate transactions. They also choose one full-year LLM paper from a selection of corporate papers, including Corporate Finance and Corporate Governance. In conjunction with the full-year papers, students take four one-term modules, usually two in the Michaelmas term and two in the Lent term. The modules enable students to conduct a more detailed study of certain specialist areas of corporate law, such as shareholder litigation and international merger control. A number of students wish to remain in Cambridge after completing their master's degree in order to pursue further advanced legal studies, either by undertaking research for the Diploma in International Law, the Diploma in Legal Studies, the MLitt degree or the PhD degree.