HRM3420A (Wednesday)
Employment Law
Professor David Doorey
Legal Opinion Assignment – Dismissal For Cause
Basic Objective:
Use your legal research and reasoning skills to prepare a brief memo for your client explaining the law that will be applied to a specific scenario. Your client (the employer) wants to know if it has grounds to terminate an employee without notice (summary dismissal). Your memo should provide the employer with a solid and accurate basis for assessing whether it can summarily dismiss the employee. This assignment deals ony with the common law of dismissal for cause, which is dealt with in Chapter 14 of your textbook and in other assigned materials in the outline.
Grading (Due Wednesday Nov. 18th)
This assignment is worth 20 percent of the final grade. It will be graded on the following basis:
(1) Proper description of the law as it applies to your scenario. Graders will be asking themselves this question: Would the client be in a position to properly assess whether it has cause to the dismiss the employee with cause based on your memo?
(2) Selection of appropriate case law. You must select and submit one case in which the employee was dismissed for cause for the same reason considered in your assigned scenario. You will be graded on the appropriateness of the case selected. We are a looking for a case that gives a good summary of the law on your topic.
(3) Writing style and grammar. This is a professional memo, and therefore it should be well-written, with proper spelling and grammar. Marks will be allotted for writing style.
Specific Instructions
Group or Individual
This assignment can be done in groups of two people, or individually. If you do the assignment as a group, make sure that you include both names and student numbers on the assignment. Both members of the group will receive the same mark, so chose your partners wisely. If you don’t trust the other person to do their share of the assignment, then submit an individual paper.
Select Topic
There are five ‘scenarios’ listed below. If you are doing an individual assignment, your topic is the one that corresponds with the first letter of your surname. For example, if your surname was Jessop, you would do Topic 2 (F-J). If you are doing a group assignment, select a topic that corresponds with one of the surnames of the two group members.
1. (A-E) The employee showed up for work intoxicated.
2. (F-J) The employee swore and engaged in verbal abuse of a manager.
3. (K-0) The employee was absent from work far more often than other employees.
4. (P-S) The employee is a lousy worker, who works slowly and creates products of poor quality.
5. (T-Z) The employee gets into a fistfight with a co-worker.
Research Law
Once you have your topic, start researching the law. Your text and other employment law textbooks will be useful, but when you refer to a book or article, be sure to provide a proper citation that clearly indicates the source (name of author, name of book or article, and the page number).
You must also search for cases using legal decision databases. In the search windows, you need to look for wrongful dismissal lawsuits in which the employee was dismissed for cause (without notice) for engaging in conduct like that which is described in your scenario. Make sure you have a common law case and not a case involving a complaint by an employee under a statute. A common law case will always be decided by a court (rather than a tribunal), and will involve an employee seeking to recover damages for ‘reasonable notice’.
Stick to the following two sources of case law for this assignment:
(1) CanLii (the link to this website is on the course blog under Other Useful Sites (click “Find Canadian Case Law”). Enter search terms in the window labeled ‘full text” or the name of a specific case, if you have one, in the window labeled “case name”.
(2) Quicklaw:
1. Go to York Library home page. In the Title Quick Search window, type Quicklaw.
2. Click “Go to this resource’ under the Quicklaw tab [not the Lexis Nexis Academic link]
3. If at home, you will be asked for your library password and username. You may also get a page asking you to Register for Quicklaw. If so, click “Register Later”.
4. Once on the Quicklaw homepage, click Court Cases on the list of tabs along the top.
5. Now you can enter search terms in the “Search Terms” window.
Proper Citations
Do not quote or borrow from external sources without referencing that source, as this is plagiarism and a serious academic offence. Do not cut and paste material from the Internet and pretend it is your own writing. That too is plagiarism and it is very easy to catch. This memo must be in your own words. Quotations are permitted, if fully cited.
If an assignment includes text from another source that is not cited, grades will be deducted and/or the students will be reported to the Academic Dishonesty office.
Format
Your memo should be between 4-5 pages, double-spaced. It should accurately explain to your client what ‘legal test’ courts apply to facts like those in your scenario. Note that in all of the scenarios, the outcome of cases will vary depending on the circumstances. Therefore, your memo should advise the client what sorts of facts or issues will be relevant to a court if the employee were to sue the employer and challenge the employer’s assertion that it had cause to dismiss the employee.
Your memo must include a description of at least one decision by a court that deals with the same fact scenario you are dealing with, and that, in your opinion, provides a nice summary of law in relation to that issue. You must provide in your memo a case summary of that decision, including a brief statement of the key facts, and what decision the court made (ie. What was the outcome, and why?). You must submit a hard copy of the decision with your memo.
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