Scholar begins epic drive after being awarded a First

  • July 15, 2011
Scholar begins epic drive after being awarded a First

Sam Walker wins a First in his Law master's and sets off on Mongolia adventure.

A Gates scholar has graduated with a first in his Law master’s course and plans to take up a post as a law clerk at Canada’s Surpreme Court of Justice.

Sam Walker [2010] did his LLM in International Law with his thesis on the philosophy of international law, specifically the lawfulness of killing in war. Not only did he get a First, but he was ranked second in his year group. His director of studies Jo Miles says this “fully vindicates the award of his Gates scholarship”.

He says he doesn’t think he would have been able to come to Cambridge without the Gates scholarship and adds that he benefited hugely from being a member of the Gates community “by meeting so many diverse and fascinating people, attending great events, and making lasting friends”.

Before he takes up his new one-year post in Canada as law clear to the Honourable Justice Morris Fish, he plans to drive a Nissan Micra from London to Mongolia with a group of friends to raise money for Christine Noble Children’s Foundation charity for underpriveleged children in Mongolia and Vietnam and “for the adventure”.

This is not his first road-trip experience. He has also biked across the US, driven across Canada and done a bus trek through Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya.

Sam, who has previously worked in the War Crimes Chamber of the State Court of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo and represented refugees and new immigrants at legal aid clinics in Kampala and Montreal, says he hopes eventually to do a PhD as he would like to teach.

Latest News

Exploring the emotions behind Archaeology

Archaeology is a discipline that excavates the past, piecing together scant and often disparate details to answer questions about how people lived, grew, interacted and died. For Madalyn Grant [2024], this means that Archaeology is a discipline steeped in human emotions. Yet, for a subject so infused with emotion, its practitioners tend not to confront […]

Making waste work

Luca Di Mario’s PhD in Engineering focused on sustainable business models for turning solid waste and waste water in developing countries into a useful resource, such as energy.   That work has stood him in good stead for his work at the Asian Development Bank where he is currently Senior Advisor to the Vice President for […]

A changing man

The world has always been in flux, but the last decades, particularly the recent one, have been ones of rapid, often violent, transformation on many fronts. For Jaya Savige [2008] the last 11 years since leaving Cambridge have been characterised by profound change on both the personal and professional front. He has captured all of that […]

Second series of Gates Cambridge podcast coming

It’s a new academic year and Gates Cambridge is working on the second series of its So, now what? podcast taking into account feedback over the summer on our first one. The new series, which will launch in January for our 25th anniversary year, will once again be hosted by international journalist Catherine Galloway and […]