Sydney, New South Wales · Sessions aligned to semesters
CaseSharp for Macquarie law students
Macquarie runs a four year LLB and five year doubles, with a Bachelor of Psychology and LLB combination that is unusually popular. Sessions align to the standard semester pattern, so the national rhythm of assignment clusters and exam blocks applies to you more or less as written.
CaseSharp is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Macquarie University. Names of universities are used only to describe who a page is written for.
How the degree is structured
- LLB is four years as a stand-alone degree.
- Doubles run five years. A Bachelor of Psychology paired with the LLB is a popular combination.
- Sessions align to the standard semester pattern.
A four year LLB is less common in Sydney than it looks
Macquarie offers law as a stand-alone four year LLB, which is not the Sydney default. The University of Sydney admits school leavers into combined degrees only, and UNSW offers law to school leavers as a double degree rather than as a stand-alone undergraduate program. That makes Macquarie one of the Sydney schools where a school leaver can read law on its own from first year, alongside UTS. The practical difference is load shape rather than content: a four year LLB gives you more law units per session and finishes sooner, where a five year double gives you fewer law units per session across a longer degree. Neither is easier, and both end at the same Priestley requirements.
The psychology and law pairing
The Bachelor of Psychology paired with the LLB is an unusually popular combination at Macquarie, and it is the one double where the two halves genuinely pull in different directions week to week. Psychology assessment runs on lab reports, statistics and empirical method with structured deadlines; law assessment runs on problem questions, research essays and an exam that is worth most of the mark. The two calendars do not stagger themselves, so the practical planning question is which weeks carry a lab report and a problem question at once. Because you are typically carrying about two law units a session, going deep on those two Priestley subjects beats trying to keep four in view.
2026 key dates
We have not published 2026 Macquarie teaching and exam dates here, because we do not have a citable source for them and a wrong date is worse than no date. Check the official Macquarie academic calendar and your unit guides.
Sessions align to semesters, so the pattern most Australian law students recognise applies: an assignment cluster around weeks 6 to 10, then a study break, then exams. Across the schools we do have published dates for, second semester exams run through November, and the assignment cluster falls in early September to mid October. Treat that as the national shape rather than as a Macquarie date, and use your unit guide for anything you are actually planning around.
What is genuinely school-specific here is the degree structure and the calendar. Everything else about studying law in Australia is shared: the same eleven Priestley subjects, the same problem question and IRAC assessment pattern, the same AGLC4 rules, and the same academic integrity consequences. If your school is not the variable you are trying to solve for, the subject pages are a better starting point than this one. Start from the eleven Priestley subjects
Clerkship applications in this state
New South Wales clerkship applications ran 10 June to 12 July 2026, the same window that applies to every New South Wales law student regardless of school. It sits across the end of first semester and the winter break. Because we do not publish Macquarie session dates, we cannot tell you exactly how it lines up with your own teaching weeks, and your session calendar is the thing to check it against. Firms set their own dates each year.
Clerkship windows differ by state and move each year. For 2026 the published windows were 10 June to 12 July in New South Wales, 6 July to 9 August in Victoria, and 13 July to 7 August in Queensland.
What your university library gives you access to
Before you pay for anything, use what you already have. Your university library has already funded research databases for you, and there are good free ones you can reach on top of them. This section is about what you can already get to as a student. It is not a statement about where CaseSharp's material comes from.
Lexis+ AU and Westlaw AU
Your university library gives you access to both while you are enrolled, at no cost to you. They are practitioner research platforms with authorised report series, deep commentary and mature citators, CaseBase and FirstPoint. They are deeper than CaseSharp on commentary and reported series, and learning to use them properly is part of the degree. Library access is usually the first thing your law school teaches you.
AustLII
You do not need a library login for this one. AustLII is free to everyone, supported by donations, and your library guide will point you at it anyway. A great deal of Australian material is publicly readable there, including older tribunal decisions and anything handed down since the CaseSharp coverage date, and on the open web an AustLII link is often the citation of record.
Jade and JADE Professional
Jade has a free registered tier anyone can sign up for, and JADE Professional is available free to law students with a university email address. Arrangements vary by institution, so check what your library lists before you assume you have it. It is a fast, well-liked lookup and citator tool, and it costs students nothing.
CaseSharp is not a substitute for any of that, and anyone telling you otherwise has not used them properly.
Where CaseSharp fits alongside them
It sits in a narrower gap: the ten minutes before a tutorial, the night a problem question is due, and the week you are compressing a semester into a scaffold. Four things specifically.
Speed
Ask a question the way you would ask a tutor and get an answer in plain English with the authorities attached, rather than building a search string first.
Briefs
Any judgment becomes an IRAC brief: material facts, issue, rule, application and what was held, each part linked back to the paragraph it came from.
AGLC4
Full form and short form with pinpoints, ready to paste into footnotes, flagged for manual review when a reference cannot be parsed rather than guessed at.
Verification
Every claim in an answer links to the paragraph it came from, the citation graph shows which cases cite an authority and which it cites, ranked by influence, and Sharp says when it cannot find authority instead of inventing a case.
73,000 audited Australian decisions, current to the end of April 2026. Judgments handed down after that date are not in the corpus yet, so for anything very recent, check AustLII or your library database as well.
Your law school sets the rules, not us
Australian law schools treat undisclosed AI use as academic misconduct, and a finding has to be disclosed to the admissions board when you apply to be admitted. The rules are set by your university and often by the individual subject convenor, so check the policy for each assessment and disclose where your subject requires it. CaseSharp is a research and study tool. It does not write assignments, and every substantive output carries a human-review notice.
Subject packs
Pick the Priestley subjects you are enrolled in this semester. Each page covers what the subject includes, cases you are likely to meet, and how to use CaseSharp for that subject's assessments.
Questions Macquarie students ask
- Why are there no Macquarie dates on this page?
- Because we do not have a source we can point to for the 2026 Macquarie calendar, and publishing a date we cannot stand behind would be the same mistake this product exists to avoid. The university publishes its own academic calendar and your unit guides carry the assessment dates. Everything else on this page holds regardless of the calendar.
- I am in the psychology and law double. Does that need different planning?
- It needs earlier planning rather than different planning. The two halves assess in different shapes, so the weeks that hurt are the ones where a lab report and a law problem question land together, and those weeks are visible in both unit guides in week 1 if you look. On the law side you are usually carrying about two units a session, which means two Priestley subjects at a time. Working from those two subject pages rather than trying to hold the whole degree in view is the version of this that survives a busy session.
- Macquarie already gives me Lexis+ AU and Westlaw AU for free. Why would I pay for this?
- Because they are excellent at a different job. Lexis+ AU and Westlaw AU are practitioner research platforms with deep commentary, authorised reports and mature citators, and if you need those, use them, they are already paid for. They were not built to brief a case for a tutorial, format AGLC4 footnotes, check the citing cases behind a scaffold, or work in the ten minutes before class. That is what CaseSharp is for, and most students who pay for it keep using their library databases too.
- What happens to my access when I finish at Macquarie?
- Your university logins stop working, usually within weeks of your final result, and the databases you spent years learning go with them. A CaseSharp account belongs to you rather than to the institution: everything you saved stays, and the free plan does not expire. That is worth knowing before your final semester rather than after it.
CaseSharp is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Macquarie University. Names of universities are used only to describe who a page is written for.