Recent LMH alumna Lynnie Ngũgĩ (2022, MSc African Studies) has been awarded the prestigious Lord Denning Scholarship by the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, one of the four Inns of Court, which are professional associations for barristers in England and Wales. The merit-based scholarship will support Lynnie’s studies during the one-year Bar Course, the penultimate step prior to qualification as a registered barrister.
Lynnie arrived at LMH in 2022 to study for her MSc in African Studies, having previously studied Law and Politics for her undergraduate degree at another university. During her undergraduate studies, Lynnie spent a year abroad reading Singaporean law and politics, and she also volunteered with Amnesty International in Nairobi, Kenya and spent time providing pro bono legal advice at the Manchester Legal Advice Centre.
Talking about her decision to pursue her Masters in African Studies, Lynnie explained: ‘Towards the end of my [undergraduate] studies, I recognised there was a gap in my international knowledge. One region which I felt I knew little about - aside from my own personal ethnic and cultural links – was Africa. So, I decided to pursue an MSc in African Studies at Oxford to enrich my geopolitical knowledge and research the operationalisation of Human Rights within an African context. Owing in large part to the 2007/8 Kenyan crisis which adversely affected my ethnic group, my research focuses on electoral justice in Kenya. This includes reviewing the efficacy of the 2010 constitution, which was enacted to safeguard against future crises, and conducting a comparative study between the 2022 Presidential election and preceding elections.’
During her time at LMH, Lynnie has been the recipient of the Penny Freer Graduate Scholarship, without which she says she ‘simply would not have been able to accept my place onto the programme and live in Oxford’.
Once she is successfully called to the Bar, Lynnie hopes to pursue a career in Human Rights on a domestic and international level.