Law and Politics (with Professional Placement Year)

Our Law degree develops your practical and vocational skills alongside your knowledge of legal theory.

• Put your legal knowledge into practice while you develop career-enhancing skills.

• Designed to prepare you for a wide range of careers, both within and beyond the legal sector.

Designed to help you attain many of the skills required to complete the practice elements of the Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE), Law at Bath Spa develops your legal knowledge, research and professional skills.

This innovative Law degree is informed by the new regulatory framework for the training of solicitors and barristers, and meets the requirements of the Bar Standards Board. Gain a broad understanding of legal systems and criminal law. You'll expand your knowledge to topics such as international law, media and entertainment law, and cybercrime. In your final year, you’ll hone your practice skills in our law clinic, or undertake a law research project.

Learn how to be a lawyer in practice and understand the business of law, so that you can hit the ground running when you graduate. We recognise that many Law students don’t pursue a career in law and have built career planning into each strand of the course, with a focus on the growing number of roles that require related skill sets. These include roles in governance, risk management, advocacy, public policy, HR and finance.

Our innovative Politics degree has been designed to enable you to acquire specialised subject knowledge while developing practical and professional skills that you can apply to contemporary challenges, issues and debates.

What do people really mean when they say they’re not 'interested in politics'?
Political action or inaction shapes our lives every day, in ways which are often invisible, or which seem remote or impenetrable. We know that it matters, but we can also feel removed from it: the vast sums of money spent on elections and then nothing seems to change, the narrowness of so much debate and the pointlessness of point scoring, getting power in order to keep it.

We want to try to get under the surface of all these assumptions and ask if it really has to be this way. We want to try to understand the politics of everyday life, as well as the major challenges of climate change, poverty and inequality, the imbalances of wealth and power nationally and internationally, and between elected governments and unelected corporations. Who decides: the local councillor, the member of parliament, or the chairman of the board?

More about the Professional Placement Year
A Professional Placement Year (PPY), traditionally known as a sandwich year, is where you undertake a period of work with an external organisation for between 9-13 months. The placement occurs between your second and final years of undergraduate study. You can engage in multiple placements to make up the total time and are required to source the placement(s) yourself, with support from the Careers team.

The LLB Law degree covers the ‘foundation law subjects’ required by the Bar Standards Board, including tort, contract, criminal, and property law. It also introduces practical skills such as case analysis, negotiation and alternative dispute resolution, drafting, interviewing and mooting.

You'll develop the ability to understand connections between legal topics; this replicates legal and paralegal practice, where problems are rarely neatly packaged. You'll also be supported to develop your professional practice and employability skills throughout the degree.

You'll select from a range of interdisciplinary options including business, criminology and sociology, as well as law options such as corporate law, employment law or entertainment, media and intellectual property law. This will enable you not only to be a better lawyer – due to your experiences outside of a legal education framework – but will also provide you with better employment prospects if you choose not to follow a career in law.

We'll encourage you to undertake a work placement, and the law clinic in the third year is an experiential learning option that will give you the opportunity to provide legal advice to clients.

Politics

Year one - Introductions and foundations: develop your skills in political thinking, and follow a broad curriculum which allows you to ask questions, challenge your own assumptions, interrogate evidence, data and opinions.

Year two - Practical, applied, relevant: this year combines the academic study of Politics with the acquisition of professional skills and the application of your knowledge and understanding to a defined problem or idea.

Year three - Professional Placement Year.

Final Year - Achievement, consolidation, creativity: your final project in the third year brings all this together. You’ll identify your own area of study, develop your proposal and put it into practice. This might be an extended piece of academic writing, but it might also be a pitch to a local employer, a community project or the creation of digital resources.

We use a mix of traditional and contemporary assessments, including essays, group and individual presentations, online reports, surveys, projects, practical tasks and exams. You’ll also learn to communicate key messages visually, as well as in words.

The Law section of the course will include a range of practice based assessments such as drafting, negotiating and mooting. It will also include a limited number of exams to prepare you for the SQE (Solicitors Qualifying Exam).