Guide to Legislation, Cases, and Media Reports (LCMR) (1 Viewer)

Examine

same
Joined
Dec 14, 2011
Messages
2,373
Gender
Undisclosed
HSC
2013
I've received quite a lot of PMs regarding Legal Studies so I thought I might as well make a guide on what I deem the most important part of extended responses.

Introduction

LCMRs are essential to adequately answer extended responses in Legal Studies, being primarily used to support your analysis. However, despite playing such a significant role it seems that a lot of textbooks fail to adequately provide enough LCMRs to achieve marks within the high A range. Therefore, it is up to teachers and students to do their research and find their own LCMRs if they want to achieve these marks. This is basically a guide to help find relevant LCMRs.

The role that LCMRs play in essays are explained in by enoilgam in this. If you want to read further into it here is the link to the thread:

http://community.boredofstudies.org/24/legal-studies/legal-studies-essay-guide-283235.html

Legislation/Cases/Media reports (LCMR)

LCMRs is an important aspect of any legal response. However, whilst many people incorporate them into their responses, they often fail to use them properly.

LCMR’s should primarily be used to provide SUPPORT for your analysis. Legislation and cases specifically can also be used to demonstrate a point of law (i.e. The case Williams v R (1986) states that a person cannot be arrested solely for the purposes of investigation).

When using LCMR, you need to clearly explain how they support your argument, as opposed to merely listing them (unless they are being used to demonstrate a point of law as above). Throwing LCMR into your essay won’t gain you any marks.

Furthermore, if you only describe LCMRs related to the question you will fail to score beyond a band 4, because you aren’t providing the markers with your own analysis. To quote again from the 2009 Notes from the legal marking centre “The better responses from both questions referred to a range of recent cases and reflected sound planning of their response rather than simply providing a description of various issues, examples, sources, acts and cases.”

To sum up, with LCMR, it’s all about how you use them to support your answer, not how many you can fit into the essay. In other words QUALITY NOT QUANTITY
To provide an example of this, below is one of the paragraphs I wrote in the HSC in 2013 (I received 23.5/25 for this section if that adds any credit to it)

Evaluate how effectively the law resolves conflict in family relationships.

In response to the UNCROC 1989 and various other international measures the federal government was pressured into implementing the Family Law Amendment (Shared parental responsibility) Act 2006 (Cth), which encouraged greater cooperative shared parenting in families after divorce. The effectiveness of this reform is reflected through statistics that show that through the 2006 reforms the time it takes to resolve complex cases has reduced from 17 to 8 months and the percentage of stressed children from the process from 30% to 4%. However, the fundamental failings of the 2006 amendment is reflected through Robert McClelland’s 3 independent reviews of the 2006 amendments that noted that due to these reforms there has been the placement of children and victims of domestic violence in danger due to creating a reluctance for victims to report family violence due to the possibility of receiving less custody. This is further emphasised in “these kids are not all right” (The Herald – 2011) that accentuates how it is through this imbalance created where shared parental responsibility is given higher dominance over the protection of children that reflects the failure of the federal government in resolving conflicts in a manner that adheres to UNCROC principles. Moreover, in the case of Rosa v. Rosa (2009), the complexity and impracticality of these 2006 amendments in resolving conflicts is highlighted, where the confusion that has been created due to these reforms fail to uphold the “best interests of children”. Therefore, although promoting resource efficiency in complex cases the 2006 amendments remain largely ineffective in resolving disputes due to not upholding the best interests of the child.

Anyway, now that we have explained this, we'll go onto finding LCMRs. I'll try keep this as concise as possible.

Legislation

In my opinion this is the part of LCMRs that are best covered by textbooks. With textbook information alone (I recommend Cambridge), you should have enough legislation to adequately answer extended response questions, so this is not too much of a problem. However, if you want to get an advantage over other students you can find additional legislation by following this blog (this is also useful for finding cases and media articles)

http://blog.sl.nsw.gov.au/hsc_legal_studies/

Cases

Cases are scarcely added into textbooks so it is up to students to find cases. Cases which are both relevant and contemporary can be found in the links below.

http://blog.sl.nsw.gov.au/hsc_legal_studies/
http://www.austlii.edu.au/
http://guides.sl.nsw.gov.au/content.php?pid=242811&sid=2193148

Media Articles

Media articles are arguably the easiest type of evidence you can find. You can simply find media articles by following the news, whether it'd be via reports from Four Corners or from the Sydney Morning Herald. However, if you are looking for specific media articles that are directly related to specific dotpoints type in those dotpoints in the search bars of these sites and you should find at least 1 or 2 relevant articles.

http://www.smh.com.au/
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/
http://www.abc.net.au/news/

Data

Data is mainly used in Crime due to the accessibility of statistics from BOCSAR. So normally most students will go to the official BOCSAR site http://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/bocsar/bocsar_index.html . However, I found it easier to find BOCSAR statistics by typing in "BOCSAR" in the search bar of SMH and the Daily Telegraph, which will make finding data much easier.

___________________

Good luck Legal Studies students :)
 
Last edited:

Maxwell

bow peasants
Joined
Aug 1, 2013
Messages
394
Location
not near u coz u aint hot enough
Gender
Male
HSC
2014
Very helpful advice! It's nice to know there are people that are out there that are willing to share their tips, etc. that differentiated themselves from their cohort. Thank you very much!
 

enoilgam

Moderator
Moderator
Joined
Feb 11, 2011
Messages
11,876
Location
Mare Crisium
Gender
Undisclosed
HSC
2010
Stickied - this is a great thread examine.

The most important point I emphasise with LCMR is to ensure that you use them properly in an essay - you cannot just randomly throw LCMR into your response or describe them. You must use them to support your answer and actively evaluate them in order to provide evidence for your thesis. As you can see with Examine's example, the LCMR arent being described - they are being evaluated and analysed in order to show whether or not the law is effective.
 
Last edited:

Users Who Are Viewing This Thread (Users: 0, Guests: 1)

Top