Posted: April 14th, 2015

Legislative Memo Assignment 2015

Legislative Memo Assignment 2015

AIMS & OBJECTIVES

To practise the skills of:

• locating primary legal material, and
• legal writing and analysis, by
• briefing legislation

Task

Legislation: Vexatious Proceedings Act 2005 (Qld)

Find the current version of this legislation, and write a ‘Legislative Memo’ (ie summary) about it. A legislative memo is not simply a list of the various sections or parts of the Act. You should give a concise and meaningful summary of:

• the purpose/s of the legislation: including any specific concerns or mischief that motivated the legislation. In this respect you may benefit from consulting extrinsic material such as the Explanatory Notes or Second Reading Speech.
• The structure of the legislation and how it achieves the purposes of the Act: This is not simply a list of summarised sections or Parts of the Act. How do the Act’s structure, its key provisions (especially the main rights, prohibitions and obligations created in the Act) and the institutions it concerns fit together to achieve the Act’s purpose/s?
• give some critical perspective on the legislation by applying concepts learnt in the course so far. For instance, is the Act likely to achieve its purpose/s? Could it have any unintended consequences? Does it create a fair balance between the competing interests involved? Does it adopt a particular theoretical model, comply with the rule of law and/or respect the separation of powers?

Assessment criteria

Students will be assessed on:

• Ability to find and access a  piece of legislation nominated by the course convenor
• Understanding of rules of statutory interpretation
• Understanding of legislative conventions and norms
• Ability to accurately and critically analyse the nominated legislation
• Ability to draft a clear, concise and accurate item of written assessment, including grammar, spelling and writing style
• Appropriate and accurate referencing

GENERAL INSTRUCTIONS

Length: Maximum of 1000 words not including reference material

Research: This is not primarily a research exercise. Your task is to find, analyse and prove your comprehension of the legislation assigned. In considering legislation, you may of course refer to and cite extrinsic materials (where available), such as the explanatory memoranda and/or second reading speech in the Hansard debates on the Bill, or have recourse to legal dictionaries to aid interpretation. Secondary sources may be useful, but only to give you background context. Since this is not a research essay, you will get no particular credit for referring to secondary sources.

Referencing: You must appropriately reference any idea which is not your own, including any direct quotes or copied material from any source.

Plagiarism Warning & Referencing: If you do draw on published sources and quote from them or directly use their ideas, you must give them credit. To fail to do so is plagiarism. It is also poor legal argumentation: Your argument will be stronger if you can give external authority for ideas or propositions, and then build on those authorities with your own, clearly expressed, reasoning.

If you quote directly from the legislation that you are summarising, you must indicate that it is a quote by either putting it in quotation marks “like this material in quotation marks” or indenting it in a separate paragraph:

Like this indented paragraph.

You must then add a footnote giving the source of the quote. If you closely summarise the ideas in the legislation, you should also use a footnote, showing the source of the idea.

Plagiarism also occurs if you hand in work that is essentially similar in any key respect to another student’s.

Both forms of plagiarism are serious forms of academic misconduct (see the Course Outline for further information and warnings about plagiarism penalties).