Mōrena

The lovely 400-odd LAWS110 students have their 2nd essay due this Friday at 12 noon.

The essay questions is ” New Zealand held its first general election in 1853. Since when can New Zealand be said to have
been a fully democratic state?” in 1500 words. They must use the New Zealand Law Style Guide (NZLSG) and include a bibliography (the bibliography isn’t included in the word count).

There is a lot of information on the LAWS110 Learn site for students including:

• a workshop video from me explaining how to find material
• a number of electronic readings from the lecturer
• an FAQ forum of students most frequently asked questions related to the assessment (Sascha – lecturer – and I will be adding to this list through the week).

John and I are trying to be on AskLIVE as much as we can this week.  I am also going to run a no-appointment dropin session tomorrow (Thursday 29th) between 10.30am and 1pm in Ātea Ako to answer all the last minute questions we are expecting.

The key questions I think we may get on AskLIVE (in case we are not on) are:

• help finding the material. There is no clear answer to the question.* Students need to read widely and identify this themselves as part of their argument. There is lots of information in their textbooks (all tagged with LAWS110 in the Library catalogue).
• help with the “above n ?” rule (this is 2.3 in the NZLSG). John, Kim and I have made this handout to help with this https://canterbury.libguides.com/ld.php?content_id=48132058
• help with the bibliography. There is a guide to this here: https://canterbury.libguides.com/ld.php?content_id=49208186
• how to cite a website – students need to use rule 7.1 and include all the information they have. If there is no author or date then you don’t need to include it. But double check what they want to cite first – often its not a website but a report, encyclopedia or database content.

Any questions please just send them to John or I and we will take over. Our shared email is law@libr.canterbury.ac.nz

Thanks so much

Theresa

*John and I think either 1947 or 1986 would be the date we’d choose if we had to answer this question. But there are lots of arguments either way.  You could also argue that we still aren’t until we become a republic… but we don’t have to write the essay!