Overview
Overview
In this course, you will gain a comprehensive foundation in the knowledge required of legal advisors and practitioners.
You'll learn core skills essential to legal practice and build a strong commercial awareness. From early on in your studies, you’ll start to recognise the importance of respecting the rule of law along with the responsibilities and ethics of legal practice.
You can also choose from a range of optional units, to tailor your degree to your interests. These optional units focus on topics such as forensic advocacy, employment law, family law, law and technology, human rights law, and native title law and policy.
You'll complete most of your course at Curtin Law School in the heart of Perth’s legal precinct. Importantly, you can gain practical experience through simulated legal proceedings in Curtin's high-tech moot court, working on real cases at the John Curtin Law Clinic and participating in our Legal Internships Program.
The accelerated format of this course enables you to complete the equivalent study load of a four-year degree in just three years of full-time study. After the first year of your course (comprising two semesters at Curtin Perth), you'll study your second and third years in trimesters at Curtin Law School in Perth city.
Legal Internships Program
Curtin Law School maintains relationships with various organisations that offer legal internship placements to our students through this optional unit.
You can experience working in a legal environment such as a court, law firm or community legal centre, with an organisation’s in-house legal team or with a barrister. These experiences will develop your legal skills and help you identify the area of law in which you'd like to practise.
Practical Legal Training
You can complete your entire pathway to legal practice through Curtin. Our Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice is recognised by the Legal Practice Board of Western Australia, and is the first Practical Legal Training (PLT) program to be directly delivered by a WA university.
Together, your Bachelor of Laws and Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice will satisfy the academic and practical legal training requirements to qualify for admission to the legal profession in WA.
Double degrees
We offer a range of double degrees with our Bachelor of Laws:
What jobs can the Law course lead to?
Careers
- Barrister
- Criminal lawyer
- Employment lawyer
- Family lawyer
- Human rights lawyer
- In-house counsel
- Mining lawyer
- Solicitor
Industries
- Law
- Private legal practice
- Courts and tribunals
- Banking and finance
- Government
- Resources
What you'll learn
- apply knowledge of the Australian legal system, statutory rules and case law principles in both the fundamental areas of legal knowledge and a range of elective fields to the resolution of legal problems
- critically and creatively analyse legal problems to articulate the issues involved and apply legal reasoning to make a considered choice between competing solutions
- identify, access, assess and synthesise relevant information from primary legal sources such as cases and legislation and secondary sources such as journal articles and commentaries (including electronic versions of these sources) and gather relevant oral and documentary evidence
- communicate the outcomes of legal research and analysis effectively, appropriately and persuasively to colleagues, to clients and to other professionals and the broader community
- use appropriate electronic legal databases for research purposes and be able to communicate effectively in electronic forms
- maintain intellectual curiosity as to justice and its practical application in the legal system, be able to identify areas where their legal knowledge and skills require further development, and to critically reflect on their own performance as legal professionals, making use of feedback as appropriate
- articulate the similarities and differences between local and other jurisdictions, including interstate and overseas ones, and be aware of the principles of public and private international law
- articulate distinct concepts of law, justice and human rights, with an awareness of different legal traditions and cultures, particularly indigenous cultures; identify how and where indigenous persons and other identifiable social groups are differentially impacted by the legal system.
- work independently, as well as collaboratively, with a developing sense of the ethical issues that arise in legal practice and how these may be resolved
