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BA Law with Criminology (with Foundation Year)
About this course
Law with criminology is a combination that enriches a legal education with the social scientific study of crime, criminal justice, and the responses societies make to offending and harm. Law gives you the analytical and interpretive skills to read and reason with legal rules and principles, understanding how rights are defined, how courts make decisions, and how the criminal justice system is structured and regulated. Criminology adds a critical perspective on those systems, asking how crime is defined and measured, who gets criminalised and why, and whether the institutions of criminal justice achieve the goals they claim to pursue. Together the two subjects develop lawyers who think critically about justice, not just technically about rules. At the University of Northampton, this four-year full-time programme includes a foundation year, a sandwich placement year, and a work placement. The foundation year prepares students whose prior qualifications benefit from additional academic development before degree-level study, making this degree accessible to a wider range of students. The sandwich year and work placement provide structured professional experience, which is particularly valuable in law and criminology, where understanding how legal and criminal justice systems work in practice is as important as studying them in theory. Northampton has connections with local legal practices, courts, probation services, and other criminal justice agencies that support these professional experiences. You will study the foundations of English law, including contract, tort, criminal law, and constitutional and public law, alongside criminological theory, the sociology of crime and deviance, penology, victimology, and criminal justice policy. The combination develops both legal reasoning and social analysis. Graduates of law with criminology degrees pursue careers in the legal profession, including solicitors' firms and barristers' chambers, as well as in criminal justice agencies, the probation service, the prison service, victim support, social work, policing, and social research and policy.
Syllabus & Modules
Typical curriculumStudent Satisfaction
National Student Survey - 65 respondents (77% response rate)
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