First Semester 2018 – Mid-Semester Written Assignment

Torts
(LAWS1203 AND LAWS6103)

Due: 18 April 2018 at 12 noon

IMPORTANT NOTES

 Note that the Turnitin program checks for evidence of inappropriate collaboration
and plagiarism, which as you know are strictly prohibited.
 Do not use another person’s published idea without a citation.
 To quote a text written by someone else, you must have both a citation and clear
quotation marks to indicate which prose is not originally your own.
 Do not reuse your own or another’s past university work on this assessment.
 It is your responsibility to be aware of these policies and all others relating to
academic integrity. Before beginning your assessment, take time to familiarise
yourself with ANU policies here: http://www.anu.edu.au/students/program-
administration/assessments-exams/academic-honesty-plagiarism

INSTRUCTIONS

 Details of task: This assignment requires students to engage with legal problem
solving. Students are given a set of facts relating to content taught early on in
the course (the law of trespass as covered in weeks 1-4). Students must
analyse those facts and use their knowledge of the law in this area to discern the
most appropriate response to a request for legal advice. The timeframe of the
assignment requires students to focus their efforts and to apply their analytical
and writing skills efficiently and effectively.

 Nature of task: Compulsory and NOT redeemable. The consequence of non-

completion of this assessment task is an NCN for the entire course.

 Value or weighting: 30%

 Release: Wednesday 14 March 2018 at 12 noon via WATTLE

 Due date: Wednesday 18 April 2018 at 12 noon via WATTLE (‘Turnitin’) and
hardcopy

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 Assignments are submitted using Turnitin in the course WATTLE site. You will
be required to electronically sign a declaration as part of the submission of your
assignment. You must keep a copy of the assignment for your records. Do
NOT include a cover sheet with your Turnitin submission.

Please leave yourself at least 15 minutes before the deadline to submit this
assignment on Turnitin, in case you run into technical problems. Such
problems are common. Turnitin may slow down when many students hand in
assignments simultaneously in the final minutes.

In this course, in addition to submitting a Turnitin copy via WATTLE, students

MUST submit a hard (printed) copy of the version uploaded on Turnitin
by this deadline – 12 noon on 18 April 2018 – to the ANU College of Law
Services Office. Hardcopy assignments must include a cover sheet:
(https://law.anu.edu.au/current-students/student-assessment).

Please note: submission occurs when the assignment is uploaded to Turnitin

on WATTLE. Provision of a hard copy of the assignment by a student does not
count as submission (but hardcopy submission must occur before the due date).
The hard copy will be marked, and among other things is to enable the marking
team to cross-mark assignments.

 Penalties for late submission: Late submission is permitted, but the penalty
for late submission is 5% per working day that the assignment is late.
Extensions may not be permitted 10 working days after the due date. Refer to
the ANU College of Law policies: https://law.anu.edu.au/current-
students/policies-procedures/extensions-late-submission-and-penalties

 Word limit: 2000 words (see word count instructions in College policies:
https://law.anu.edu.au/current-students/policies-procedures). This includes
quotations, but not footnotes. However, footnotes should be reserved for
referencing and should not contain any substantive argument. You should avoid
quoting extensive passages of case law as this may detract from the force of
your answer or suggest that you have not engaged adequately with the material
itself.

 Penalties for excess word length: Refer to College policy

(https://law.anu.edu.au/current-students/policies-procedures) for default word
length penalties. These will be strictly enforced, since one of the skills being
assessed is conciseness and clarity.

 Referencing requirements: In accordance with the Australian Guide to Legal

Citation (3rd ed, 2010, http://www.law.unimelb.edu.au/mulr/aglc).

 Pinpoint referencing requirement: For all law assignments and essays

submitted to the ANU College of Law, you will be required to provide pinpoint
references in your citations. However, as some of the cases in the law of
trespass are very old (and not all able to be accessed with the databases that we
have here at the ANU), we are waiving the pinpoint reference for cases decided
prior to 1900. You must still provide pinpoint references, where relevant,

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 for all cases decided from 1900 onwards. This means you cannot rely simply
on the extracts from your casebook, because the casebook does not supply
pinpoint references for the passages extracted from judgments. Instead, to find
the pinpoint references you will need to access the original case in full, using
the techniques that you have been taught in Foundations of Australian Law.

For cases decided prior to 1900, you are still required to provide the citation in
accordance with the Australian Guide to Legal Citation (3rd ed, 2010), but are
not required to include a pinpoint reference.

This is a one-off arrangement only. In future you will be required to provide

pinpoint references for all sources in your assignments, regardless of the age of
the source.

 Other requirements:
o Microsoft Word files only for electronic submission; no PDF files.
o Your assignment must be typed and double-spaced using a 12-point
font. All other formatting matters are up to your discretion.

 No research: This is not a research assignment. You are to answer the question
using only the material covered in the lectures and the required readings.
Everything you need to know about the relevant law is in your lectures and
required readings. The only research you will need to conduct is a search of the
online library databases to locate the original cases (for cases decided from 1900
onwards) in order to supply pinpoint references. You need not read any of the
cases in full. You need only read the extracts of these cases which are set out
in your casebook: Harold Luntz et al, Torts: Cases and Commentary
(LexisNexis Butterworths, 8th ed, 2017). As this is not a research assignment
you are not required to supply a bibliography.

 Assessment rubric: The assessment rubric for this assignment is available on

the Torts (LAWS1203/LAWS6103) WATTLE page. Please read it carefully
before you begin the assignment.

 Estimated return date: Marks and feedback for the assignment will be
available on WATTLE for students by the end of Week 10, or sooner if possible.

 Relationship of the assignment to learning outcomes: The assignment is

designed to enhance student competence in the following skills: case-law
analysis, legal problem-solving, critical and analytical thinking, creative
thinking, legal argument, working independently and written communication.
Accordingly in doing this task you will have demonstrated the following
assessment criteria:

o a sound knowledge and critical understanding of the relevant case law as

well as any applicable covered legislation;
o an ability to identify the relevant legal issues in a factual scenario;
o a sound knowledge of the relevant legal principles and an ability to discuss
the relevant law;

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 o an ability to apply those legal principles to those facts and using appropriate
skills of legal reasoning formulate a relevant legal argument;
o an ability to assess the merits of legal arguments and draw clear conclusions;
o an ability to employ legal citation methods;
o a capacity to discriminate between problematic and non-problematic legal
issues embedded in a set of facts;
o organisation of answer (ie. clarity, order and logic in how it is organised and
legal methodology skills);
o sound written communication skills (including precision and accuracy in
legal writing).

 Questions during assessment: After the assignment is released, do not pose

any questions to your convenor, lecturers or tutors on the substance of the law.
You need to answer the question yourself. You may pose logistical questions,
if they are not already covered in these instructions.

ASSIGNMENT QUESTION

Evan is an 18-year-old professional rugby union player who lives in New South Wales.
He is invited to attend a party for players in his rugby team at Matthew’s house in
Mosman, New South Wales. Matthew is another 18-year-old player on the same rugby
team and Evan’s best friend. On the evening of the party, Evan makes his way to
Matthew’s house. The party is in full swing when Evan arrives. Loud rock music is
blaring from the speakers. Many people are standing around, talking and consuming
large amounts of alcohol, and several party guests are dancing wildly or crowd surfing
on the dance floor in the middle of the living room.

Evan sees Matthew dancing with some friends on the dance floor. Evan, who is a little
immature, decides that it would be fun to knock Matthew to the ground. Evan runs at
Matthew from behind and crashes into Matthew. This sends Matthew crashing to the
floor. Matthew knocks his head on the floor and is rendered unconscious. He also
stops breathing. Theodore, another rugby player, has recently completed an advanced
first aid training course. Theodore immediately renders first aid to Matthew. He
performs cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on Matthew. After five minutes,
Matthew regains consciousness and ultimately makes a full recovery.

A month later, Matthew has forgiven Evan for what happened at the party. One
Saturday, Matthew and Evan decide to spend the day at a small island that is located in
the middle of a lake in Sydney, New South Wales. The island, which is roughly the
size of a football field, is uninhabited. Matthew and Evan set out on Matthew’s
speedboat and travel to the island together. On the trip over to the island, Evan leans
over the side of the boat to admire a fish and inadvertently drops his phone into the
water.

When they arrive at the island, Matthew pulls his speedboat to shore. Nobody else is
on the island. Evan and Matthew enjoy a picnic lunch together, laughing and joking as
usual, when Evan makes a rude and insensitive joke about how he knocked Matthew to
the ground at the party. Matthew is enraged. He runs over to his speedboat, gets in and
drives off, yelling to Evan, ‘Ha! Good luck trying to get off this island! By the way,
I’m the only one who knows you are here. I’m going to come back soon with a knife

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and you will be sorry when I do!’ The island is located 500 metres from the shore of
the lake. It is a windy day and the water is choppy. Evan roams around the island for
half an hour, considering his options for escape, when Mary and Donald (who are not
known to Evan) arrive on the island on their speedboat. They give Evan a lift back to
the shore.

The following day Matthew is walking along a street in Mosman when the scarf that he
is wearing blows off onto the front yard of a nearby property. The property is owned
and occupied by Bernadette. Matthew walks towards the property. Apart from a steel
gate, the front yard is entirely fenced off from the street by a high steel fence. There is
a sign on the front fence which says, ‘Private Property – Do Not Enter – Guard Dog
Patrols This Property’. Matthew peers over the fence and sees a large guard dog
patrolling the path that leads from the gate to the front door. Matthew notices that the
steel gate is closed but not locked. He sees the guard dog walk towards the front door.
He quickly opens the gate, runs over to his scarf (which is located in the middle of the
path) and grabs the scarf before running back onto the street and shutting the gate
behind him.

Advise Matthew as to the likelihood of success of any possible actions in trespass

that arise from these facts. You must address all possible trespass actions: actions
that Matthew may have against others, and actions that others may have against
Matthew.

You are to address liability only. Do not discuss remedies (for example, damages
or injunctions).

Discuss the law of trespass only. Do not refer to any other torts (for example,
defamation or negligence).

Do not discuss the precedential value of cases from other Australian jurisdictions.
For example, do not write: ‘Case X is a Victorian Court of Appeal case and would
therefore be of persuasive value to a court in New South Wales.’ You should
proceed on the basis that a trespass case from any Australian jurisdiction is
persuasive in any other Australian jurisdiction, and that overseas cases (for
example, UK cases) are also persuasive.

You should use the HIRAC method to answer the question. There are many
different ways to structure an answer logically, using the HIRAC method. We
suggest that you organise your analysis by parties. Example:

Andrew v Bianca
Issue 1
Issue 2
Issue 3

Carol v Doug
Issue 1
Issue 2 … (etc)