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UNSW Law & Justice graduates have a powerful combination of strengths.

They have the very best academic grounding in law or criminology, informed by diverse theoretical perspectives and critique, and also a deep understanding of how these disciplines operate in practice. 

Through our distinctive teaching tradition, our students acquire the knowledge and skills for success in pursuing a full range of opportunities, whether in commercial legal practice or community law centres, from running a startup, to working in the justice or law enforcement system, to roles in government or international organisations, developing law reform or public policy.

Our students can experience law in practice through the UNSW Kingsford Legal Centre and other clinical legal education and internship opportunities. We provide our law and criminology students with a specialist, dedicated careers service to help them explore options throughout their degree so they are ready to take the next step that is right for them on graduation.

Working across three schools, our academics are engaged in research and teaching that focuses on the contemporary challenges of our times. Our leading research areas include the need to regulate the increasing role of technology in our lives, refugee protection and forced migration, international finance systems and digital currency, criminology and criminal justice, government accountability and press freedom, environmental protection, intellectual property law, human rights, and justice for Australia’s First Peoples. On these and many other issues, we contribute to public debate, whether through the media or formal submissions and evidence to law reform bodies and parliamentary inquiries. Our students have numerous opportunities to work alongside our academics in these research and engagement activities.  

Our commitment to the notion that our work should serve the needs of the local and global community runs very deep and has been the mission of UNSW Law & Justice since its creation more than 50 years ago. Whether expressed simply as ‘social justice’ or by some other formulation, the idea is proclaimed in a banner that hangs at the entrance of the Law Building. It carries the call of Emeritus Professor Hal Wootten AO, the faculty’s founding dean: ‘A Law School should have and communicate to its students a keen concern for those on whom the law bears harshly.’ 

Professor Wootten’s words are borne out today in our title, the faculty of Law & Justice – where academics and students in law and criminology come together to study, research and debate the ideas and laws that sustain a democratic and just society.

Professor Andrew Lynch - Dean, UNSW Law & Justice