Undergraduate - UnitLAW1104 - Research and writing

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2013 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

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6 points, SCA Band 3, 0.125 EFTSL

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Level	Undergraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Law
Offered	Clayton Second semester 2013 (Day)

Synopsis

There are two components taught concurrently. The Writing component will teach basic skills in legal writing, with an emphasis on the types of writing required for assessment in other law units, including research essays and answers to legal problems. The Research component will provide students with the essential skills to undertake research tasks required for their law studies. Students will learn to analyse a research problem into searchable components; locate and update Australian and foreign primary and secondary materials by using online and hard copy library research tools; use and cite references correctly, and evaluate the relevance and authoritative status of legal materials.

Outcomes

Upon completion of this unit, students will be able to:

design and implement an efficient research strategy to answer a legal research question, using the most appropriate online and paper-based research tools;
critically evaluate the relevance, quality, authority and currency of the materials that they find;
correctly use, attribute and cite the work of others and avoid plagiarism
identify the hallmarks of good legal writing, and use them to edit and improve their own writing; and
apply and develop their higher order thinking skills of evaluation, problem-solving, synthesis, and analysis in writing on legal topics.

Assessment

There will be no final examination.

Assessment Task 1:
Legal Writing Assignment: 20% (1000 words)
Opinion writing piece on a current issue, based on provided resources.

Assessment Task 2:
Statutory Interpretation: 30% (1500 words)
Students will be required to critically evaluate a piece of legislation in accordance with the basic principles of statutory interpretation. In order to complete this task, students will need to undertake research on extrinsic materials.

Assessment Task 3:
Research Assignment: 40% (2000 words)
A research memorandum of advice or legal opinion based on a scenario, leading on from assessments 1 and 2. Feedback from instructors will be provided on the feedback sheet via Student Services after the final mark is released.

Research Exercise: 10%
A series of short answer exercises testing the student's research skills learned in class. Delivery and submission will be via Moodle.

Chief examiner(s)

Dr Eric Wilson

Contact hours

Students will have three hours of small group seminar classes each week. Preparation for class will typically require about 3 hours a week. Private study, group work, further reading, written exercises and assessments will account for the balance of 12 hours of study time per week throughout the semester.

Prerequisites

LAW1101