Program Overview

In La Trobe's Bachelor of Laws(Honours)/Bachelor of Science, you can pursue multiple interests and gain a powerful combination of legal skills and cutting-edge scientific knowledge.

From stem cell research to how personal information is collected, stored and shared, advances in science and technology have real human impacts. This double degree uniquely prepares you to address contemporary challenges from a scientific, legal and ethical perspective.

Benefit from our progressive approach to legal education with a law degree you can shape to your own career goals. You'll get a solid grounding in the basics of law and hone your expertise in advocacy, negotiation and dispute resolution – skills valued by employers across industries.

Your science degree offers you huge flexibility, with an extensive range of majors to choose from. Follow your interests in emerging areas like cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and data science or traditional fields including chemistry, botany and genetics. Bring knowledge to life in world-class facilities, including the La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science (LIMS), and learn from academics who are leaders in their fields.

Take your skills into the real world while you study. You'll have the opportunity to do placements in a range of legal settings, including community legal centres, law firms, government agencies, and judges and magistrates (subject to availability). On the science side, you could complete a placement with one of our industry partners – previous students have worked with CSIRO, Bayer Crop Science, and various government departments.

You will graduate ready to start your career as an expert legal practitioner, with an advanced understanding of scientific concepts or a science professional with a solid understanding of regulatory environments and how they impact scientific work.

You'll learn:

• Dispute resolution: Build key skills in negotiation and mediation to support your future practice. Learn about the processes of arbitration, conciliation, mediation, and negotiation in commercial disputes.
• Private and public law: Learn to apply the legal principles underpinning contract law, develop the skills to specialise as a corporate legal expert, and discover how government power is distributed, exercised and controlled.
• Discipline-specific legal expertise: Align your legal education to your area of scientific specialisation by choosing law electives from fields including environmental law, international law, intellectual property law, cyber law, and policy.
• Professional scientific thinking: Learn how science contributes new knowledge and finds solutions to problems in our society.
• Lab and fieldwork skills: Learn how to collect data and use specialist technical skills to develop new findings in the laboratory and in the field. Learn to find solutions to complex scientific problems.

Major: Ecology

Examine the complexity and diversity of organisms and how they interact to make the environment ‘work’.

Discover the diversity of plants and animals in Australia and their extraordinary adaptations to their environments. Make your own observations on plants and animals and the complex relationships between species. Explore current and emerging threats to flora and fauna and ways to protect and manage threatened species. Learn to ‘read’ landscapes, and understand how human land use, climate and disturbance processes shape the living world.