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You are a soli­citor spe­cial­ising in con­tract law. Write a memor­andum of advice for your cli­ent, con­cern­ing pos­sible claims and out­comes, should Keith Bon­ham sue the pro­du­cers of ‘The Time­keeper: 2XS The Search for Rhythm’. You may choose whether you want to rep­res­ent Keith or the pro­du­cers. While your advice should be clearly writ­ten, it should dis­cuss the issues of law in suf­fi­cient detail, so that it would be inform­at­ive to another law­yer, as well as your client.

Seems simple enough? You would be mis­taken dear reader.

After receiv­ing the assign­ment earlier in the semester, I, and I assume most of the other law stu­dents star­ted work on it. Lo and behold, on 22 April, a mere 5 days before the assign­ment was due, we received this delight­ful little email from the Law faculty:

Dear Students,

It has come to my atten­tion that through a quirk in the sys­tem all stu­dents enrolled in Con­tract Law Term 1 have access to the WebCT cite for the Sum­mer School pro­gram for Con­tract Law.

The Assign­ment which is due next Wed­nes­day has its gen­esis in a prob­lem set in that sum­mer school pro­gram to which a model answer is given on the Sum­mer School Web page.

In addi­tion to some stu­dents who have not seen this link being dis­ad­vant­aged, the integ­rity of the assign­ment is now compromised.

You are now instruc­ted not to pro­ceed with or hand in the assignment.

It is neces­sary to now put in place a new assess­ment régime.

That assess­ment will take the form of an in class closed book exam to be held in week 8 in the second class of that week. Any stu­dents who can­not attend that class should con­tact me to make arrange­ments to sit the exam at another time.

The exam will be a 1 hour exam. It will con­sist of one prob­lem ques­tion which again focuses on that part of the course up to and includ­ing ‘Inten­tion to con­tract’ and will raise sim­ilar issues of prin­ciple as that raised in the now defunct assignment.

This exam will ensure that all stu­dents are on a level play­ing field, it will take advant­age of the study you have already done for the now defunct assign­ment so that pre­par­a­tion time is min­imal and will not take up any more of your home research time.

My sin­cere apo­lo­gies for this incon­veni­ence. We will be work­ing with the Web Ct to ensure this prob­lem does not occur again.

Dr Greg Tol­hurst
Course coördinator

Great. Just bloody great. Of course I wouldn’t be rant­ing if this sorry little saga ended there. It’s bad enough that we now have an exam to study for instead of a done-at-home assign­ment, but today, the day before the ori­ginal assign­ment was meant to be due, guess what lands it our inboxes.

Dear Students,

Re: Con­tract Law Assignment

You are advised that the ori­ginal con­tract law assign­ment can now go ahead.

You should hand in your assign­ments by mid­day Monday 9 May at the OTC (week 9).

On your WebCt page you will now see a sum­mer school logo which con­tains two answers sub­mit­ted for the Sum­mer School assign­ment together (now) with the ques­tion they answer.

You can con­sider these an extra resource if you so choose. If you choose to look over them you should con­sider them as no more than the decision of judges at first instance on a sim­ilar but dif­fer­ent scen­ario. You should NOT con­sider any state­ments in those answers as author­it­at­ive state­ments of legal prin­ciple or as author­it­at­ive examples of the applic­a­tion of legal principle.

Regards

Dr Greg Tolhurst

P.S. Please do not reply to this email.

Charlie Hour­das
MInt­Bus Syd, BCom Syd, BIT CDU
Inform­a­tion Officer

Sydney Law School
The Uni­ver­sity of Sydney
Level 12, 173 – 175 Phil­lip Street
Sydney NSW 2000

www.law.usyd.edu.au

phone: +61 2 9351 0271
fax: +61 2 9351 0200

The smart thing would have been to organ­ise a fresh assign­ment due about a month from now. But oh no! Let’s level the play­ing field by giv­ing every­one Star Wars: Epis­ode IV movie buy On Any Sunday the model answers!

It’s a damn shame that this sort of incom­pet­ence isn’t isol­ated to law fac­ulty co-ordinators. Busi­ness lead­ers and CEOs get away with bank­rupt­ing thou­sands of share­hold­ers, Church lead­ers cover up scan­dal after scan­dal, and politi­cians lie out of their arses. Who says aca­demia doesn’t pre­pare us for the real world?