Introduction to the faculty

By both Australian and international standards, the Monash faculty is large with seventy full-time academic staff and a total enrolment of more than 2000 undergraduate and graduate students. Law is currently offered only on the Clayton campus with the law school located in its own building to the south of the Menzies building. The Monash Law faculty aspires to excellence in legal research and undergraduate and graduate legal education. As one of the leading law schools in Australia (and in the view of many, the premier law school) the faculty seeks to integrate the following objectives:

to continue to provide high quality services to students, who are the primary focus of our endeavours;
to continue to provide undergraduate and graduate courses which are both intellectually rigorous and respond to changing social needs;
to pursue excellence in teaching, learning and education;
to foster excellence in research through leadership, rigorous inquiry and innovation;
to develop further our community culture and collegial environment;
to continue building relationships with the legal profession;
to initiate and contribute to the consideration of legal issues in the legal profession and the wider community.

The faculty seeks to provide undergraduate teaching of the highest quality across the range of the discipline of law. This teaching recognises the value of the study of law as a method of providing a broad liberal education, and meets the faculty's obligation to prepare students for legal practice. The obligation on the faculty to prepare students for practice is an obligation not merely to prepare students for the practice of law as it is presently carried out, but to provide them with the intellectual skills necessary to enable them to educate and adapt themselves to the demands of practice as those demands change throughout the course of their careers. The teaching obligation of the faculty extends to providing a suitable education for those students who may pursue careers not as practitioners, but also as academics, members or employees of law reform agencies, business men and women and members of the public service.

The faculty expects graduate and continuing education in law to become more crucial in the coming decades. It is likely that an increasing number of practitioners will hold an LLM and enrol in various graduate courses beyond that stage for the purpose of updating knowledge and to keep in touch with new and developing areas. This expectation led the faculty to undertake an extensive review and restructuring of its graduate program recently to align it more closely with the changing needs of practitioners and to make it more attractive to the profession, while maintaining rigorous academic standards and encouraging more research and scholarly activity within the graduate program.

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