What

Electives Should I Take in Law School: Evidence From a Survey of

Australian Lawyers

Sandeep Gopalan1


Law Schools offer an extensive array of elective courses for law students to
choose from. These can range from courses that are obviously related to
employment outcomes to courses that exist to satisfy the research interests of
staff whilst having some token connection to graduate employment outcomes.
Students are expected to navigate this range of offerings and make choices based
upon some combination of their often incompletely developed subject matter
interests, estimates about market demand in particular areas, career aspirations,
and scheduling constraints. Coevally, law schools are engaged in a process of
balancing a range of competing concerns: providing a rich array of electives,
ensuring a good educational experience for students in each elective, clarifying
learning and graduation outcomes, maintaining a reasonable staff-student ratio,
and staffing courses within time-tabling limitations. If these issues are
insufficient to provide law school administrators with headaches, in an
increasingly challenging financial climate, law schools are also being required to
ensure that their course offerings are financially viable. In sum, elective courses
present challenges at both the supply and demand ends of the spectrum.

Therefore, in order to provide some guidance to students and to enhance
Newcastle Law Schools suite of elective courses, the author undertook a survey
of practicing lawyers in Australia to gather data on the perceptions of the
profession in relation to the electives offered by the law school. Survey
participants were also polled on their views about prospective elective courses
to be offered by NLS. The survey had 259 responses from Newcastle, Sydney,
Canberra and other locations offering a wealth of expertise from leaders in the
profession. The results are below.

1 I am very grateful to Susan Hood for setting up the survey questionnaire and
Debbie Willett for her invaluable assistance in disseminating it to participants.