Law: Proposal and Dissertation Writing

A quality of the proposal and the dissertation is based on thorough research, entailing the engagement with an array of materials - laws, judgments, books, articles, papers on the internet, government reports, etc. The central principle is that you must clearly distinguish your own thoughts and opinions from those of others. Plagiarism - the use of other authors’ materials without recognising such use - is the ultimate academic sin. It leads to the outright failure of the dissertation and possible disciplinary proceedings. The University provides a computer service (Turnitin) to students in terms of which paragraphs and sentences in an essay are assessed against all that are available on the internet. The programme then indicates the percentage correlation of the student’s work with internet sources.

The academic convention is to recognise other authors’ work by indicating the source of an idea, sentence, or paragraph in a footnote. One of the functions of footnotes is, then, when you use an idea, argument or sentence from an author, to acknowledge this fact by referring to the source. When the very words of an author are used, they must appear in quotation marks, with full reference to the source in a footnote.

Footnotes are also used to provide authority for a statement of fact or law that you may make. If the statement is about the content of a law, then the citation of the appropriate law and section in that law is required.
The style of the footnotes must follow the prescribed format which is attached to the Guidelines. If the format is not followed, the proposal will not be acceptable.