What are the types of law and your experiences in 1st year Uni? (1 Viewer)

[lunaaaa4403]

isnt engineering science just a fake engineering degree. law itself is fine. business, fine. i don't imagine uts arts being great

 

[lunaaaa4403]

maybe take a peek at your atar before you pick a uni. you might not even have a choice as to where you go.

 

[gammahydroxybutyrate]

uts usyd unsw will generally be preferenced above mq when hiring

i would say uts is slightly above macq but not in the same tier as usyd/unsw. macquarie had a better reputation before they started handing out early entry to everyone (before they switched from GPA to WAM) so a lot of principal solicitors still have the older perception of macq in their head.

 

[gammahydroxybutyrate]

You have to study core courses in a law degree, you don't just pick a specific area. You can do so in law electives, but you're always gonna have to study criminal, contract, torts, constitutional, property, etc. There's probably going to be courses you don't like as much. If you're just generally interested in how the law works, you'd probably find any of those interesting.

As a first-year, I'm doing foundations and contract law. I enjoy both of them. Foundations is basically year 11 legal content, about the legal system, court hierarchy, precedent, common law, etc. Going into the degree, I thought I'd find contract boring, but I do really like it and find learning about it interesting (as well as applying what we have learned to legal advice scenarios). I don't think you necessarily know if you'll like something until you actually try it.

When people say there is A LOT of reading, they mean it (literally assigned 80 pages per week in contract), and it can be dense and dry for people. A lot of people who just did law for the sake of it (lots just in there bc they got the ATAR and didn't know what else to do) seem pretty miserable tbh, and there are people considering dropping out by wk8. It is a bit of a shock starting with the workload, weekly legal advice, weekly assignments, and the pace of the course, but you settle into it.

In legal, I did some human rights, criminal, family, and international - I enjoyed all of what we did. A law degree obviously immensely expands upon all of that, and it's really not necessary to have done legal studies other than getting a very foundational idea of whether you like law; law at uni is quite different from legal in a lot of ways.

Someone further into a law degree/law career would have a better idea of the pay/employability and the rest of the areas you mentioned.

i think this is info. pro tip, stop doing all the reading unless you want to

i think it becomes very unrealistic to do all the reading when you get into 4/5th year and do 3-4 law subjects at once. its good to be selective about your readings because reading every single case on the list will drive you nuts. if you don't read ahead before class, you can basically use class as a signpost of which cases are actually important and need to be read, and which are just sort of one liners of 'this case is authority that this happens in this situation' and theres no complexity to it, so you don't really need to read the judgment properly.

 

[gammahydroxybutyrate]

Thinking of doing a double degree of law at MQ but I have an open mind.
I didn't do legal studies and I'm yet to understand the types of law.
Here are my options...can someone tell me what they do, how they are finding it and the level of employability and pay?

• Commercial law
• Criminal law
• Environmental law
• Governance
• Human rights and social justice
• International law
• Law and the media

in terms of general employability, there are a LOT of law graduates and not a whole lot of jobs. to be competitive at a top tier firm, you would need a 70+ WAM at usyd/UNSW + extracurriculars, or 75+ otherwise. the market is very rough right now for graduates unless you have connections, insane grades or insane work experience. if you go into into law school chasing money, you will be sorely disappointed because most lawyers get paid like ass and work long hours, especially for your first few years. you will also probably drop your law degree because of the work load relative to how much you actually enjoy it.

as someone else has said, you don't choose a speciality in law school. you do the priestley 11 and then you can pick which area you go into after your degre. you basically have to study every core area, which from your list includes commercial, criminal, governance (if you mean admin law) and international law. everything else may be available as electives in your final year.

you don't need legal studies at all to do law, they're relatively different skillsets. legal studies is a good litmus test of whether you actually enjoy the study of law at all though.

 

[lunaaaa4403]

i feel like you think first year law is a lot more thrilling than it is. here are the first year subjects at UTS just for a little test taster
- Foundations of Law
- Ethics, Law and Justice
- Criminal Law and Procedure
- Administrative Law
- Constitutional Law
- Contracts

 

[eeeeeeeeeEEEEE]

i feel like you think first year law is a lot more thrilling than it is. here are the first year subjects at UTS just for a little test taster
- Foundations of Law
- Ethics, Law and Justice
- Criminal Law and Procedure
- Administrative Law
- Constitutional Law
- Contracts

That sounds fine. I feel like I'm still pretty interested.

 

[lunaaaa4403]

That sounds fine. I feel like I'm still pretty interested.

welp in summary unis from best to worst for law (and lowkey just most courses) UNSW/USYD --> UTS --> Macquarie. If you don't want to be stuck at MQ you're gonna want to aim for 90-95+. For UNSW you need to do the LAT (if you do shit in the LAT you will probs need a 99+ atar, if you get a 95-97 ish atar, you probs want 99 in the LAT) Don't quote me on the UNSW stuff though