COMPANY LAW, CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND STAKEHOLDER

RELATIONS [CML5692F]

TEST ASSIGNMENT
THE TASK
Once a company embarks on a business rescue process, the process impacts the ranking of
claims. The Constitutional Court in Diener NO v Minister of Justice and Correctional 2019 (4)
SA 374 (CC) delivered an important judgment on how claims should be ranked when business
rescue proceedings are superseded by liquidation. You are required to write a case note in which
you critically analyse this judgement from a stakeholder perspective.

GUIDELINE ON STRUCTURE
A case note is a piece of academic writing that provides a brief critical analysis of a case,
identifying and examining the key elements of the decision, as well as placing the case in its
wider legal and social context. To write a persuasive and legally sound case note, you are
advised to follow the following structure and have headings:
• Title—You must come up with a succinct title that appropriately reflects the
content/argument you advance in the case note.
• Introduction—This introduces the area of law and specific principles that were dealt
with by the judgment, what the court was called to do, what the court decided, and then
the aim of the assignment.
• Facts—Briefly identify the facts of the judgment.
• Issue(s)—Identify the legal question(s) that the court was to decide.
• Judgment—Here, you must identify the key elements of the judgment. In other words,
you must extract what was said by the court. Since this is the CC judgment, you will
have to start by discussing what was held by the lower courts, i.e., the High Court and

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 Supreme Court of Appeal. It will be helpful to have a subheading of the discussion of
each judgment.
• Analysis/Critical comments—this is where you deal with whether the decision clarifies,
develops, or confirms the existing principles. You are required to discuss the area of
law in detail, citing statutes, academic writing and other judgments that have decided
on a similar issue, i.e. ranking of claims.
• Conclusion—This must summarise the main points of your submissions or arguments.

A guide on the essentials of a case note will be uploaded on Vula. It may be helpful for you to
look through a few case notes to understand the structure and approach to writing a persuasive
case note.

INSTRUCTIONS
Please refer to the ‘Guidelines for Research Tasks for the Professional LLM’. Submissions
must comply with requirements set out therein regarding the cover sheet, style rules,
referencing, and the need to avoid plagiarism. Marks will be deducted if these requirements
are not followed. Note that a bibliography is NOT required for a case note.

Please ensure that your research task does not exceed 3000 words, which includes references
but excludes the cover sheet. The deadline to submit your task on Vula via Turnitin is 03 April
2024 [Before 17:00]. Please note that the task should be in MS Word format and NOT PDF.

Please keep in mind that there is a 5% late penalty for each day after the due date. No
submissions will be accepted after 7 days of the deadline, and submissions received after this
period will receive a grade of nil for the research task.

Please note that excuses such as load shedding, computer glitches, and submitting the wrong
version of the paper will not be considered acceptable reasons for late or no submission.

WRITING GUIDELINES
All submissions must comply with the UCT Law Faculty Research, Writing, Style, and
Referencing Guide (2017), including adherence to the following writing guidelines.

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 1. Have a cover page with the title or research topic, your name, student number, and
course code.
2. Be typed in font size 12 with 1.5 line spacing within the paragraphs and double line
spacing after the paragraph.
3. The text must be justified.
4. Pages must be numbered at the bottom centre of the page.
5. Margins must be 2.5cm.
6. South African English or British English and not American English should be used. For
example, the correct spelling is ‘recognise’ and not ‘recognize; ‘labour’ and not ‘labor’.
7. Abbreviations or SMS language must not be used.
8. All references must be in the form of footnotes and must conform to the Guidelines for
Research Tasks for the Professional LLM read in conjunction with the UCT Referencing
Guide (2017), which largely reproduces the South African Law Journal House Style.

ZERO TOLERANCE ON PLAGIARISM

You must adhere to UCT’s plagiarism policies and guidelines to avoid plagiarism. Please refer
to http://www.uct.ac.za/main/about/policies. All research tasks will be thoroughly checked for
plagiarism using advanced software. The unethical use of Artificial Intelligence in scholarly
writing falls within the definition of AI-powered plagiarism and will be treated accordingly.
Any discovery of plagiarism will result in the candidate being automatically reported to the
Students’ Disciplinary Committee, as the university has a zero-tolerance policy concerning
plagiarism. The submission will automatically receive a mark of nil.

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ASSESSMENT RUBRIC

The submissions will be carefully assessed and graded in accordance with the grading rubric provided below.

STUDENT ID:

EXAMINER: Dr Tebello Thabane / Dr Simphiwe Phungula

DATE:

FOCUS & COVERAGE (10%)

Identification of all relevant issues Unaware of issues

Topic covered in depth Superficial treatment of topic

Coverage relevant to topic Little relevance

STRUCTURE & ARGUMENT (60%)

Independent approach / interpretation Little evidence of originality

Logically developed argument Rambles and lacks continuity

Adequate analysis of subject Descriptive account of subject

Critical evaluation of subject Uncritical account of subject

Accurate presentation of evidence Evidence inaccurate or questionable

Able conclusion on findings Weak or no conclusion on findings

SOURCES & THEIR USE (20%)

Sources adequately acknowledged Inadequate acknowledgement

Effective use of sources Information/figures/tables add little

Wide use of different sources Over-reliance on a few sources

Correct citation of sources Much incorrect or incomplete referencing

of sources

STYLE & PRESENTATION (10%)

Fluent and grammatical writing Clumsy and ungrammatical expression

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 Succinct writing Unnecessarily repetitive

Appropriate set-up (introduction, logical Poor set-up (missing introduction,

headings relevant to topic and structure of conclusions, no headings or headings not
argument, conclusions) relevant)

Effective paragraphs Over/under length paragraphs

Correct spelling throughout Much incorrect spelling

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