The School also helps students to obtain summer clerkships before final year and employment after graduation. Law Library staff are always willing to assist students to locate materials. The School also has a growing cohort of postgraduate research students whom it draws into the intellectual life of the School. The UNSW law curriculum has a national outlook and character, rather than a parochial orientation towards practice in a particular jurisdiction. That national outlook, frequently bolstered by an international dimension in many areas of legal development, prepares students for careers in a diversity of jurisdictions and occupations.
Legal education is a hybrid of two elements.
First, The Law School is part of the great university tradition of scholarship and intellectual inquiry for its own sake. In that character, legal education emphasises reflection, and the theoretical dimensions and systematic analysis of legal phenomena. The Law School encourages a spirit of adventure in the development of theory and has faith in its insight for the active use of law to reform our social orderings and to cast light upon their understanding. Yet the Law School is also a professional school which prepares its graduates for a diverse range of careers including, but not limited to, the practice of law. In this character, it has a commitment to the application of theory and legal doctrine in ways that are technically adroit, creative and imbued with high ethical standards.