INSTRUCTIONS
In Equity, there is only ONE ASSIGNMENT. This assignment is compulsory and must be submitted by all students. The assignment will constitute 20% of the final mark in this subject.
Extensions need to be requested by email PRIOR to the assignment due date and specific supporting evidence provided. Late assignments attract a penalty of one mark out of 20, or 5% of the total marks available, per day.
Assignments that are received more than ten days after the published due date will not be accepted. Please note that students granted an extension must still submit their assignment within ten days of the original assignment due date.
Students are expected to achieve at least a pass mark of 50% in assignments to be eligible to sit for examinations. However, a category of ‘deemed eligible' has been introduced to offer students whose assignment mark is between 40-49% an opportunity to sit for the examination. In these circumstances students are often advised not to sit. A mark below 40% means a student is not eligible to sit for the examination.
Students who fail to satisfy the compulsory requirements will be notified through the Results screen on the Webcampus before the examination period of their ineligibility to sit the examination in this subject.
The rules regarding the presentation of assignments and instructions on how to submit an assignment are set out in the Guide to the Presentation and Submission of Assignments available on the LEC Webcampus. Please read this guide carefully before completing and submitting this assignment.
The maximum word length for this assignment is 2000 words (inclusive of all footnotes but not bibliography).
COMPULSORY ASSIGNMENT
A jurisdictional hurdle to be met before a court can make an order for specific performance of a contract is that damages for breach of contract at common law must be inadequate.
McBride (N J McBride, Key Ideas in Contract Law, Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2017, p11) argues that the inadequacy of damages principle renders specific performance rare for the following reasons:
The rarity of specific performance is easily accounted for on the basis that the remedy of specific performance amounts to a much more serious intrusion on civil liberties than an order to pay damages.
This is not just because ordering someone to act in a particular way is more constraining than ordering someone to pay another money (this is why people would much rather give money to charity than volunteer their time to work for a local charity) but also because the breach of an order for specific performance amounts to a contempt of court, punishable through imprisonment - so making an order for specific performance turns a simple breach of contract into a potential crime.
Moreover, ordering a contract to be specifically performed involves a lot more work for the justice system, both in adjudicating future disputes over whether the order for specific performance has been properly observed and in dealing with contractors who fail to abide by those orders.
The courts, quite properly, will refuse to involve the justice system in such extra work if damages would be an ‘adequate remedy' to protect the interests of the victim of the breach of contract.
Finally, being able to obtain an order for specific performance and being able to hold it - with the possibility of punitive sanctions for its breach - over the head of the breaching party creates all sorts of unpleasant opportunities for extorting excessive amounts of money from a breaching party in return for allowing the order to lapse.
Again, the courts, quite properly, would rather not create such opportunities for extortion when damages would be an ‘adequate remedy' to protect the interests of the victim of a breach of contract.