Program Overview

Law with Criminology with Foundation Year

Overview

Prepare for a rewarding career in law and justice with our Law with Criminology with Foundation Year programme. This course combines academic study with practical experience, giving you the tools and skills you need to succeed in your future studies.

Course Details

Foundation Year

• Introduction to English Law: This module provides a fundamental understanding of the key areas of English law, which you will build on in future modules.
• English Legal Systems: This module covers the functions of the law in society, the court system within England and Wales, the manner in which law is made in England and Wales, and the individuals working within the legal profession.
• Academic and Personal Skills: This module helps you develop yourself, including creating a CV, learning how to write a cover letter, and finding out what your learning style is.
• Further Legal Knowledge: This module provides an introduction to further areas of legal knowledge beyond the core modules on the law degree, covering cyber law, family law, medical law, human rights law, and public international law.
• Introduction to Legal Skills and Attributes: This module introduces you to core academic and legal skills, including legal research skills, and the use of technology to solve legal problems.
• Employability for Life: This module helps you acquire and develop an understanding of the employability skills required to succeed in your chosen industry.

Year One

• Contract Law: This module concerns itself with the rules governing legally binding agreements between two or more parties.
• Legal Systems and Digital Legal Skills: This module introduces you to the English legal system and its role within society, and develops your skills in interpreting primary and secondary sources of law.
• Tort Law: This module covers the core areas of Tort, with emphasis on its role in day-to-day life.
• Criminal Law: This module explores the criminal law system in England and Wales, focussing on substantive criminal law.
• Criminal Justice and Human Rights: This module introduces you to the form, key features and purpose of the institutions of the contemporary criminal justice system in England and Wales.
• Understanding Criminology: This module introduces fundamental questions in criminology, including what is crime, what causes crime, and how should we best respond to criminal behaviour.

Year Two

• Public Law: This module allows you to analyse the nature and structure of the UK constitutional arrangements post-Brexit.
• Theoretical Criminology: This module develops an understanding of the range of theories of crime and criminal justice, and locates the key issues of criminology within their socio-political and historical context.
• European Union (EU) Law and the UK: This module gives you a general introduction to European Union law, dealing with the structures and institutions of the EU, the obligations imposed upon the EU Member States, and the rights conferred upon EU citizens.
• Land Law: This module covers the law relating to the formation, financing, and management of companies, and related corporate activity.

Optional Modules

You will choose two of the following 20 credit module options:

• Media Law: This module introduces you to the key aspects of Media Law, including the freedom of the press, reporting restrictions, and pretrial publicity.
• Commercial and Consumer Law: This module examines the law relating to the sale and supply of goods and services, agency, product safety, insurance, and consumer credit.
• Human Rights, Genocide and Resistance: This module addresses the complex and often paradoxical relationships between human rights, extreme human rights abuses, particularly genocide, and resistance to such abuses.
• Violence in Society: This module provides an overview of the conceptualisation of “violence”, examining debates concerning violence in various aspects of life.
• Critical Perspectives on Policing: This module introduces you to issues surrounding policing and social control, situating contemporary issues and debates within the broader theoretical, social, political, and historical context.
• Critical Victimology: This module offers students an opportunity to develop and apply knowledge on victimology, including causes, processing, and responses to victimisation at individual, community, and criminal justice levels.
• Environmental Justice: This module invites you to think critically about the most pressing issue of our life – the Climate Crisis – and examine this through both a Sociological and Criminological lens.
• Internet, Risk and Security: This module critically engages with ideas concerning social and cultural issues associated with risk and security regarding the uses of the internet.

Optional Placement Year

You have the option to do a professional placement year, taking a year in industry to learn in a real-life environment whilst earning a salary and paying no tuition fees.

Final Year

• Criminal Justice and Punishment: This module introduces you to the form, key features, and purpose of the institutions of the contemporary criminal justice system in England and Wales.
• Equity and Trusts: This module provides an introduction to an invisible system of justice which runs alongside the common law known as Equity.
• Optional Modules in Law: You will choose one of the following 20 credit modules in semester one and one option in semester two:
  • AI and Law: This module introduces key technologies that have the potential to change how lawyers operate in practice, with a particular focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI).
  • Employment Law: This module looks at complex issues relating to employment law, including how the law defines ‘employment’ and the impact that this legal definition has on how the area is regulated.
  • Medical Law and Ethics: This module looks at the interplay between the ethical, practical, and moral dimensions which affect the healthcare professionals’ decision-making process.
  • Law in Action: This module develops hands-on legal skills, working under supervision in the University’s SILKS Law Clinic on housing, employment, and family law cases.
  • Family Law: This module considers the current law on divorce, proposals for reform, and how this affects the division of property and finances when marriage and co-habitation comes to an end.
  • International Law: This module introduces you to international law, covering the nature and history of international law, the way in which public and private international law is made, and distinct issues such as statehood and state immunity.
  • Caring for Clients in the Working Environment: This module considers the first contact with a client in some detail, including the importance of making the best possible impression on a new client/customer.
  • Civil and Criminal Litigation: This module builds on the fundamental principles of law during the Contract Law, Tort Law, and Criminal Law modules from Level Four, by enabling the students to gain knowledge and skills to understand how civil and criminal litigation is applied in practical situations governed by rules of civil and criminal procedure and practice.
  • Company Law: This module covers the law relating to the formation, financing, and management of companies, and related corporate activity.
  • Competition Law and the Digital Economy: This module introduces you to the approach to competition law and policy, enabling you to critically analyse and discuss contemporary issues of competition law and policy.
  • Environmental Law: This module covers the law relating to the protection of the environment, including the regulation of pollution, conservation, and the management of natural resources.
  • Industrial Law: This module covers the law relating to industrial safety, including corporate manslaughter and the law relating to industrial relations.

Optional Modules in Criminology

You will choose one of the following 20 credit modules in semester one and one option in semester two:

• Crime, Society and Racialisation: This module gains an understanding of the construction of deviant labels based on variables of ethnicity, gender, and youth, and the relationship between these labels and crime.
• Critical Approaches to Counter Terrorism: This module provides students with a systematic understanding of terrorism and counterterrorism in the twenty-first century.
• Migration and Socio-Legal Dynamics: This module explores the complex interconnections within the field of migration studies and human rights, as related to various identities, i.e., gender, sexuality, religion, race, and ethnicity.
• Probation and Rehabilitation: This module gains an understanding of rehabilitation and personal change, developing a critical appreciation of how dominant theoretical approaches underpin professional practice in criminal justice.
• Gender, Crime and Criminal Justice: This module offers a broad introduction to the gendered dimensions of crime/criminality, criminal victimisation, criminal justice, and penology, and of the gendered theorising which attempts to account for this.
• Prisons and Punishment: This module develops an understanding of the evolution of the modern prison and of the relationship between prisons, probation, the courts, and the media and the economic and social environment in which they operate.
• The Criminal Justice Process: This module gains an overview of the philosophy, nature, significance, outcomes, and consequences of the criminal justice process and explores how it functions.

Requirements

• GCSE: Maths and English at grade C/grade 4 or above.
• UCAS Tariff points: 64 UCAS Tariff points.
• A Level: 64 UCAS tariff points from A Levels or equivalent.
• T Level: Pass - D or E.
• BTEC National Diploma: MPP in any subject.
• Scottish Highers: 64 UCAS tariff points.
• Irish Leaving Certificate: 64 UCAS tariff points.

Tuition Fees

• Full-time home: £5,760 for Foundation Year and £9,535 for subsequent years (2025/26).
• Full-time home: £5,760 for Foundation Year and £9,535 for subsequent years (2026/27).

Additional Costs

You should also consider further costs which may include books, stationery, printing, binding, and general subsistence on trips and visits.