Assignment 1: Discovery Journal
OVERVIEW: When you first visit a new city or country, when you first meet someone new, or perhaps when a child is born, it seems natural these days to make a visual record of your experience, doesn't it? Oftentimes you may make annotations to accompany the photos either to make them easier to share with others, or to help you remember in a deeper way particular experiences which the photos capture.
Studying law can be similar to a travel experience in two ways. It can take you into completely new and foreign territories or styles of thinking-such as thinking like a lawyer, thinking like a judge, or thinking like a legislator. But it can also cause you to revisit places you've often been before, but experience them in a completely new way-seeing things you never noticed before.
For example, are you married? Did you sign a contract when you got married? Did anyone take a photo of that moment? Perhaps you are not married, but do you know anyone who is-your parents or grandparents, for example? Were promises exchanged? Were rings exchanged? As you learn the elements for the formation of a valid contract in Unit 4, you may see a marriage or other type of partnership in a slightly more law-oriented way.
The Discovery Journal assignment is only five units in duration. But it is intended to provide you with the opportunity to record your unique experience of discovering law in a way that will be unlike anyone else's. As you take, collect, and arrange your photographs, be sure to write comments to accompany them so that your instructor will understand their significance to you.
The format for the Discovery Journal may be in PowerPoint, in a traditional photo album, or perhaps in other software. As noted above, its value is 10% and it is due at the end of Unit 5.
Assignment 2: The Notice of Claim
OVERVIEW: The thought of going to court to sue someone is daunting for most of us-not an experience many people would look forward to. However, knowing how to initiate a proceeding in BC Small Claims Court, Ontario Small Claims Court, or small claims courts in other jurisdictions may be a useful, practical learning experience for you.
You will be asked to draft a Notice of Claim as your third assignment, but by the time it is due (in week 6 of this course), you'll realize that other competencies you have been developing in your learning activities will inform and support your ability to complete this assignment.
To be specific, in tandem with other activities in Units 4 and 5, you have been
- practicing searching legal databases
- learning to create a timeline of significant events in a case, and
- learning to summarize the facts of a case
Two of the cases you have located by conducting searches on the BC Court of Appeal judgment database are Rushak v. Henneken and Arens v. MSA Ford Sales Ltd. Please review these cases prior to beginning to design a fresh, imaginary set of facts for your Notice of Claim. Before drafting your facts, consider why the two cases had contrasting results for the two women who purchased used vehicles from a dealership.
Note that Chief Justice Finch's decision in the Arens case is 11 years newer than that of Mr. Justice Taylor in Rushak. It may concern you that the BC legislation upon which Mr. Justice Taylor relied-the BC Trade Practice Act RSBC 1996, c 457-has been repealed. However, it has been replaced by the BC Business Practices and Consumer Protection Act SBC 2004, c 2. If you examine section 4 entitled Deceptive Acts or Practices in the new statute by visiting https://www.bclaws.ca/ (from the left sidebar select Laws of British Columbia, and then select "B" for Business Practices and Consumer Protection Act) you will see that the definition upon which Mr. Justice Taylor relied remains, in essence, the same.
Using the BC Small Claims Court website https://www.ag.gov.bc.ca/courts/small_claims/info/forms.htm please draft an imaginary Notice of Claim in which a person buys a used vehicle from a dealership. (Please invent the address for the dealership rather than following the instructions in Step 2 of Making a Claim, which requires you to confirm the address for the registered office of a company through the BC Registrar of Companies.) As you respond to the Notice of Claim section entitled What Happened, explain that after a fairly short time the vehicle you have described developed a serious problem (again, it may be any problem you may imagine) and therefore the purchaser wants a refund from the dealership.
In your Notice of Claim, please include one fact which is similar to a fact in either the Arens case or the Rushak case-a fact which you believe will cause the Small Claims Court judge to decide your imaginary case in exactly the same way as your precedent case.
Please print your Notice of Claim, since you cannot save it from the Small Claims Court website. When you submit this assignment to your instructor, state in your covering message the name of the case after which you have modeled, in your Notice of Claim, your one key fact.
Assignment 3: Case Brief
OVERVIEW: During Unit 9 of this course, you will be asked to write a case brief at the same time that you are studying a unit called the Sale of Goods and Consumer Protection Law. The case brief you'll be asked to create will be based upon a sale of goods judgment that you are already familiar with from the BC Court of Appeal website: Rushak v. Henneken.
A fair question to ask is: why it is important to learn how to brief a case? The purpose for helping you to learn this skill is a practical one. Oftentimes the required form of something shapes or drives the content. Mastering a form can be difficult, but it can help you achieve meaning and significance in your writing. A fragment of a line from the poet Dylan Thomas creates an image of this form-to-content relationship: "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower...." Learning how to brief cases allows you to see more clearly the similarities between and among cases, and to distinguish others. The whole common law system of precedent is founded on this ability to precisely compare case law.
Competencies that you have been gradually gaining through previous learning activities in earlier units will, once again, inform and support your ability to complete this assignment. Specifically, you have already:
- watched a video of Professor Wendell's very basic introduction to how to brief a case
- read an article called "How to Brief a Case Using the IRAC Method"
- watched Suzanne Bachard explain a paralegal's perspective on legal writing using the IRAC method
- watched James C. Raymond explain what he terms the architecture of a judgment
- practiced writing the facts of a case, its issues, and, after identifying the legal rule that governs the issue, analyzing how the legal rule applies to the issue, and
- read the Toronto Marlboro Major Junior "A" Hockey Club et al. v. Tonelli et al. case as well as the sample case brief created on it.
Please write a case brief of the BC Court of Appeal's Rushak v. Henneken judgment using the IRAC method. Provide the name of the case and the case citation. Then provide the procedural history of the case. As your next heading, please use the title Facts, and include under it the answers to James C. Raymond's questions:
- WDWTW: who did what to whom? Or WAAW: who is arguing about what?
Then continue in the usual format using the IRAC headings as follows:
- Issue: identify the issue raised by the client's case
- Rule: identify the rule of law that governs the issue
- Analysis or application: explain how the rule of law applies to the issue
- Conclusion: answer the question originally asked in the issue
This assignment, as mentioned earlier, is due in week 9, and is worth 15% of your total mark for this course.
Assignment 4: The Reflection Journal Part II
OVERVIEW: The Reflection Journal is an activity you will be asked to engage in as part of every unit. It will not be until the end of each unit that you are requested to make entries in your Reflection Journal-with the purpose of looking back over fresh information that you are assimilating into your legal awareness and store of legal knowledge. The activities will not be identical in each unit but instead will vary among the following feature box activities provided in the textbook:
- ASK A LAWYER: For questions presented in this style, you'll be asked to respond to a classic legal scenario often representing an actual legal problem faced by an individual interacting with a business, or between two businesses interacting together. As the title of the activity suggests, you'll be asked to put on the thinking cap of a lawyer. Doing so will mean that you engage in writing an analysis of the applicable law from that chapter in the textbook, zeroing in on what is precisely relevant to the scenario.
But to help you avoid experiencing that sinking feeling that sometimes happens to all of us the moment after we've read the instructions for an assignment but still feel unsure of what we're expected to do, the textbook authors have provided you with a list of questions for every Ask a Lawyer scenario. These questions will help you feel confident that you are aiming your thoughtful responses at the right target questions. For example, on page 29 of your textbook, you'll see the first Ask a Lawyer feature box. The questions for that scenario are on page 58. You'll always find the questions in exactly the same place-as item 1 under the heading Discussion Questions in the same chapter.
- BUSINESS ETHICS: In questions of this nature, your focus will broaden to a critical discernment of behaviour, in particular self-interested behaviour, on the part of businesses. One of the chief goals of most businesses is to pursue profit. But what if that profit is gained unethically at someone else's expense? The poet John Donne once wrote, "No man is an island, entire of itself." You may find your personal sense of right and wrong stirred up and integrated into your responses as you articulate how, without appropriate constraints, a company may directly or indirectly harm others. Perhaps it is fair to say, "No business is an island."
- MEDIA REPORT: Based on the facts of actual law-related stories reported in the media, questions in this format allow you to practise separating your emotions from your legal logic to analyze a current legal issue. Both the Ask a Lawyer questions and the Media Report questions may provide you with opportunities to apply checklists (such as the contracts checklist) that you may develop as part of your approach to writing analytically about complex legal subjects.
Attachment:- Assignment.rar