By Benjamin Ling, EAGLE Facilitator
With special thanks to Jason Bosland, subject coordinator for Administrative Law (Admin) who generously reviewed the draft of this advice.
Introduction
As you progress in your journey through the JD, the subject of Admin looms with its complexities and nuances. In this subject, students arrive at a challenging crossroads between legislation and cases on the backdrop of the game between the executive and the individuals whom it serves.
Admin is a public law subject about the decision-making of the executive branch of government. It can be challenging because it builds on the skills you learnt in subjects like Principles of Public Law and Constitutional Law but the assessments are likely very different from anything you have encountered before – especially because of the emphasis of the course on legislation and statutory interpretation as opposed to cases.
Don’t Stress Too Much About the Cases
When I started studying Admin, I felt like there was an overwhelming amount of cases. I remember them being factually complicated, getting long excerpts and then having a complex legislative regime in the background which frames the outcome.
Obviously these cases matter, however, looking back, what I think is most important is to remember that what you are really trying to do with your reading is to understand and distil the really fundamental concepts. So just remember to take a step back and think about why you are reading what you are reading. Often you will realise that there is little utility in getting bogged down understanding the specifics of the facts and the rapidly changing legislation when that isn’t the point of the reading that you’ve been assigned.
Also, at least in my opinion, unlike many of the subjects which you have studied so far, there is much less of an emphasis on analogising or distinguishing from specific facts in cases in assessments. So what should we focus more on?
Do Focus on the Legislation
What is a big focus of the subject is legislation and statutory interpretation – which again, is quite different to many of the subjects you would have done in the past. All the assessments will have a large chunk of marks being allocated to or predicated on demonstrating your understanding of the relevant legislation.
Hence, other than the classic statutory interpretation advice you will get in class (think text, purpose, context and so on), I want to emphasise the importance of being thorough and rigorous with your legislation in your assessments. Ensure that you are being methodical with the way you step through the legislation. There are many – relatively easy – marks to be gained by just walking through each clause and subsection point by point and just checking them all off. On the flip side, there are equally as many easy marks that can be lost by callously failing to define something (e.g. ‘enactment’ meaning ‘an Act’ in the VCAT Act) or failing to check the attached Schedule at the back of your legislative extract. Over the course of the subject, these minor gains and losses can add up to as much as whole grade band!
Assessments
Knowing your assessments is obviously important for all subjects, but for Admin especially, the way that the assessments are set up makes framing your studying a lot easier throughout the semester.
Admin has three assessments and they each cover discrete topics which can make studying for them a lot more straightforward (disclaimer – this has been the situation over the last few years but there is no guarantee that this will always be the case in future).
Interim Memorandum
The interim assessment only covers Merits Review. This means that all you need to focus on are the Merits Review cases (Drake, Shi, Frugniet etc), principles of statutory interpretation and remember that this is different to Judicial Review so none of those principles apply. This might seem rather obvious but because the interim is released and due after you start studying Judicial Review there is sometimes the erroneous temptation to bring some of the flashy new Judicial Review Principles into the Merits Review Interim.
OLAM
The OLAM is really just a way for the lecturers to teach and assess your understanding of the more procedural side of Judicial Review. I wouldn’t stress too much about the OLAMs. Just make sure you’ve covered the rather voluminous OLAM content and know where to find it. If you have this base, you should have plenty of time to answer the questions on the OLAM assessments.
Exam
The exam comprises two parts: (1) a long Judicial Review hypothetical problem – usually worth about two thirds of the exam marks; and (2) an essay – usually worth about one third of the exam marks. A distinctive feature of the Admin exam compared to other subjects is that you are given a copy of the relevant legislation for the hypothetical well in advance of the exam (typically a week or so before). This means that you will then have plenty of time to read the legislation, make notes and potentially even premeditate some parts of your hypothetical answer.
For the hypothetical, the classic scenario is one where a decision maker has exercised their power and you have a hypothetical client who you is asking whether they will be able to challenge this decision through the process of Judicial Review. You job will then be to advise them through this process based on what you have learnt (minus the some of the more procedural aspects which were already assessed in your OLAM).
With the essay you will typically have a choice from a few questions which you can write about. Here, as is typical with exam essays, your goal is to display your understanding of the subject through an exploration of an issue whilst bringing in aspects from across the course and proposing a compelling argument.
For both of these parts make sure that you have calculated how long you are going to spend on each question (and potentially sub question) based on how many marks are allocated. Usually, students don’t have time to say absolutely everything that they want to say in the hypothetical section before needing to move to essay section (or vice versa). This is completely okay! As with many law school exams, it is not realistically possible to say absolutely everything, rather the goal is to demonstrate that you know what the most important things are to say to get you the marks that you want.
Exam Preparation
Since you are given the legislation in advance of the exam, you can make educated predictions about what questions and topics could be on the exam and what questions and topics will not be on the exam before you actually open the exam paper. This is because by reading the provisions of the legislation will be able to eliminate certain topics or grounds which just practically cannot come up in the exam and you can see what grounds are clearly relevant to the legislation
Thus, you might be able to pre-write large portions of your exam response on the legislation alone. Thinking back to when you learned about IRAC in LMR, by closely reading the legislation in advance of the exam you can (1) issue spot – as mentioned, you should be able to make a judgement call as to some grounds being clearly in or out; (2) write out the rules related to the issues that you think are most likely relevant; (3) do the part of the analysis that is based on the legislation that you already have; and write a conclusion just leaving a space to change your modifier of success.
Please note that there has been some concern from teaching staff about the use of AI for this purpose. Please do not attempt to use AI to prewrite this. Generative AI like ChatGPT has no ability for logical reasoning. I can almost guarantee that it will not be able to issue spot correctly and it has no capacity to extract the relevant provisions in the legislation.
Finally, use previous years’ papers strategically. Since each of those papers will comprise not just a set of facts for a hypo and a set of essay questions (which is a typical exam for most subjects) but also a fairly lengthy legislative extract, to fully replicate exam-like conditions would take significantly longer for an Admin practice exam than in comparison to practice exams for many other subjects. This is because you will need to give yourself time to read and understand the practice exam legislation and do something similar to the process in the above paragraphs to prepare for the practice exam.
Thus, I would recommend doing fewer practice exams than you might for a typical subject but making sure that you are really nailing the statutory interpretation aspect when you practice. You can also use these exams as practice for making the educated predictions about what questions and topics could be on the exam mentioned above. Additionally, they will give you the chance to stress test your notes and whether they are exam ready (discussed further below). Further, they are a great way to see how long approximately it takes to get through each part of your analysis. For example, after doing a couple practice exams you might know that it takes about six minutes to establish that a hypothetical applicant has standing and that you need to leave, say, eleven minutes to do an analysis of materiality at the end of your analysis.
Note Taking
Since the legislation and terminology in Admin can be quite different from what you have likely encountered before I would strongly suggest having the original quote (from the case or legislation) but also rewriting things in your own words using plain English that makes sense to you. Then after you have a working understanding of each area of the subject you can weave together a paraphrased version of the quote. This means that you will then have a sentence that is useable in an assessment, reduces your word count (or how long it would take to type) and shows that you truly understand the key words and phrases. For example “the rule is ‘flexible’ and ‘will vary according to the nature of the subject matter of the litigation’ (Onus per Gibbs CJ), there is no ‘rule of thumb, capable of mechanical application’ (Onus per Stephen J)”.
Remember that your exam will include an essay. This means that throughout the semester you can start considering what topics or parts of those topics could be relevant to an essay. If you can have an idea of the things that you want to talk about or what areas you have some opinions on then that will set you in good stead when it comes to writing your essay in the exam. Keep in mind that you only need to pick one topic from a set of a few in the exam so you don’t necessarily need to have something to say about every essay topic in the subject. My recommendation would be to have at least a few premeditated arguments, ideas and quotes for a few topics that have historically been common in the essay portion of the exam.
Use flow charts and diagrams! I think that this advice also likely applies to many subjects in the JD. However, especially because in Admin – with all of the facts, legislation, different jurisdictions and sometimes counterintuitive processes – it can be difficult to keep track of what is happening in a case or where you are in the subject. Thus, I think that there is great utility in drawing out how things fit together and visually seeing the steps along the path. This really helps with your retention of the concepts and your understanding of what you should be doing and when you should be doing it. Even though the exam is open book and you can always go back to your notes when you feel lost, having this mental map of where you are and what you are doing really helps to orient you in the exam and throughout your study of the course as a whole. It can change the way that you see connections between topics and help you to understand why you are doing whatever it is that you are doing. This is especially useful in a subject like Admin where many of the topics intertwine (think about things the rule for standing and rule for the presumption of procedural fairness or the link between bias and materiality).
Finally, when making your exam notes, try to keep them as concise as possible. As mentioned earlier, Admin has many long and complicated cases, but there is only limited time in the exam to demonstrate your understanding of the course. You likely won’t have time to re-read and regurgitate lots of lengthy case summaries and that isn’t the purpose of the exam. To demonstrate your understanding, you will be required to show that you know what is and what isn’t important. For this reason, my exam notes ended up being only about one third the length of my semester notes and I think that reducing your semester notes to about a third or a half of their length to make your exam notes is a good rule of thumb.
By Benjamin Ling, EAGLE Facilitator
With special thanks to Jason Bosland, subject coordinator for Administrative Law (Admin) who generously reviewed the draft of this advice.
Introduction
As you progress in your journey through the JD, the subject of Admin looms with its complexities and nuances. In this subject, students arrive at a challenging crossroads between legislation and cases on the backdrop of the game between the executive and the individuals whom it serves.
Admin is a public law subject about the decision-making of the executive branch of government. It can be challenging because it builds on the skills you learnt in subjects like Principles of Public Law and Constitutional Law but the assessments are likely very different from anything you have encountered before – especially because of the emphasis of the course on legislation and statutory interpretation as opposed to cases.
Don’t Stress Too Much About the Cases
When I started studying Admin, I felt like there was an overwhelming amount of cases. I remember them being factually complicated, getting long excerpts and then having a complex legislative regime in the background which frames the outcome.
Obviously these cases matter, however, looking back, what I think is most important is to remember that what you are really trying to do with your reading is to understand and distil the really fundamental concepts. So just remember to take a step back and think about why you are reading what you are reading. Often you will realise that there is little utility in getting bogged down understanding the specifics of the facts and the rapidly changing legislation when that isn’t the point of the reading that you’ve been assigned.
Also, at least in my opinion, unlike many of the subjects which you have studied so far, there is much less of an emphasis on analogising or distinguishing from specific facts in cases in assessments. So what should we focus more on?
Do Focus on the Legislation
What is a big focus of the subject is legislation and statutory interpretation – which again, is quite different to many of the subjects you would have done in the past. All the assessments will have a large chunk of marks being allocated to or predicated on demonstrating your understanding of the relevant legislation.
Hence, other than the classic statutory interpretation advice you will get in class (think text, purpose, context and so on), I want to emphasise the importance of being thorough and rigorous with your legislation in your assessments. Ensure that you are being methodical with the way you step through the legislation. There are many – relatively easy – marks to be gained by just walking through each clause and subsection point by point and just checking them all off. On the flip side, there are equally as many easy marks that can be lost by callously failing to define something (e.g. ‘enactment’ meaning ‘an Act’ in the VCAT Act) or failing to check the attached Schedule at the back of your legislative extract. Over the course of the subject, these minor gains and losses can add up to as much as whole grade band!
Assessments
Knowing your assessments is obviously important for all subjects, but for Admin especially, the way that the assessments are set up makes framing your studying a lot easier throughout the semester.
Admin has three assessments and they each cover discrete topics which can make studying for them a lot more straightforward (disclaimer – this has been the situation over the last few years but there is no guarantee that this will always be the case in future).
Interim Memorandum
The interim assessment only covers Merits Review. This means that all you need to focus on are the Merits Review cases (Drake, Shi, Frugniet etc), principles of statutory interpretation and remember that this is different to Judicial Review so none of those principles apply. This might seem rather obvious but because the interim is released and due after you start studying Judicial Review there is sometimes the erroneous temptation to bring some of the flashy new Judicial Review Principles into the Merits Review Interim.
OLAM
The OLAM is really just a way for the lecturers to teach and assess your understanding of the more procedural side of Judicial Review. I wouldn’t stress too much about the OLAMs. Just make sure you’ve covered the rather voluminous OLAM content and know where to find it. If you have this base, you should have plenty of time to answer the questions on the OLAM assessments.
Exam
The exam comprises two parts: (1) a long Judicial Review hypothetical problem – usually worth about two thirds of the exam marks; and (2) an essay – usually worth about one third of the exam marks. A distinctive feature of the Admin exam compared to other subjects is that you are given a copy of the relevant legislation for the hypothetical well in advance of the exam (typically a week or so before). This means that you will then have plenty of time to read the legislation, make notes and potentially even premeditate some parts of your hypothetical answer.
For the hypothetical, the classic scenario is one where a decision maker has exercised their power and you have a hypothetical client who you is asking whether they will be able to challenge this decision through the process of Judicial Review. You job will then be to advise them through this process based on what you have learnt (minus the some of the more procedural aspects which were already assessed in your OLAM).
With the essay you will typically have a choice from a few questions which you can write about. Here, as is typical with exam essays, your goal is to display your understanding of the subject through an exploration of an issue whilst bringing in aspects from across the course and proposing a compelling argument.
For both of these parts make sure that you have calculated how long you are going to spend on each question (and potentially sub question) based on how many marks are allocated. Usually, students don’t have time to say absolutely everything that they want to say in the hypothetical section before needing to move to essay section (or vice versa). This is completely okay! As with many law school exams, it is not realistically possible to say absolutely everything, rather the goal is to demonstrate that you know what the most important things are to say to get you the marks that you want.
Exam Preparation
Since you are given the legislation in advance of the exam, you can make educated predictions about what questions and topics could be on the exam and what questions and topics will not be on the exam before you actually open the exam paper. This is because by reading the provisions of the legislation will be able to eliminate certain topics or grounds which just practically cannot come up in the exam and you can see what grounds are clearly relevant to the legislation
Thus, you might be able to pre-write large portions of your exam response on the legislation alone. Thinking back to when you learned about IRAC in LMR, by closely reading the legislation in advance of the exam you can (1) issue spot – as mentioned, you should be able to make a judgement call as to some grounds being clearly in or out; (2) write out the rules related to the issues that you think are most likely relevant; (3) do the part of the analysis that is based on the legislation that you already have; and write a conclusion just leaving a space to change your modifier of success.
Please note that there has been some concern from teaching staff about the use of AI for this purpose. Please do not attempt to use AI to prewrite this. Generative AI like ChatGPT has no ability for logical reasoning. I can almost guarantee that it will not be able to issue spot correctly and it has no capacity to extract the relevant provisions in the legislation.
Finally, use previous years’ papers strategically. Since each of those papers will comprise not just a set of facts for a hypo and a set of essay questions (which is a typical exam for most subjects) but also a fairly lengthy legislative extract, to fully replicate exam-like conditions would take significantly longer for an Admin practice exam than in comparison to practice exams for many other subjects. This is because you will need to give yourself time to read and understand the practice exam legislation and do something similar to the process in the above paragraphs to prepare for the practice exam.
Thus, I would recommend doing fewer practice exams than you might for a typical subject but making sure that you are really nailing the statutory interpretation aspect when you practice. You can also use these exams as practice for making the educated predictions about what questions and topics could be on the exam mentioned above. Additionally, they will give you the chance to stress test your notes and whether they are exam ready (discussed further below). Further, they are a great way to see how long approximately it takes to get through each part of your analysis. For example, after doing a couple practice exams you might know that it takes about six minutes to establish that a hypothetical applicant has standing and that you need to leave, say, eleven minutes to do an analysis of materiality at the end of your analysis.
Note Taking
Since the legislation and terminology in Admin can be quite different from what you have likely encountered before I would strongly suggest having the original quote (from the case or legislation) but also rewriting things in your own words using plain English that makes sense to you. Then after you have a working understanding of each area of the subject you can weave together a paraphrased version of the quote. This means that you will then have a sentence that is useable in an assessment, reduces your word count (or how long it would take to type) and shows that you truly understand the key words and phrases. For example “the rule is ‘flexible’ and ‘will vary according to the nature of the subject matter of the litigation’ (Onus per Gibbs CJ), there is no ‘rule of thumb, capable of mechanical application’ (Onus per Stephen J)”.
Remember that your exam will include an essay. This means that throughout the semester you can start considering what topics or parts of those topics could be relevant to an essay. If you can have an idea of the things that you want to talk about or what areas you have some opinions on then that will set you in good stead when it comes to writing your essay in the exam. Keep in mind that you only need to pick one topic from a set of a few in the exam so you don’t necessarily need to have something to say about every essay topic in the subject. My recommendation would be to have at least a few premeditated arguments, ideas and quotes for a few topics that have historically been common in the essay portion of the exam.
Use flow charts and diagrams! I think that this advice also likely applies to many subjects in the JD. However, especially because in Admin – with all of the facts, legislation, different jurisdictions and sometimes counterintuitive processes – it can be difficult to keep track of what is happening in a case or where you are in the subject. Thus, I think that there is great utility in drawing out how things fit together and visually seeing the steps along the path. This really helps with your retention of the concepts and your understanding of what you should be doing and when you should be doing it. Even though the exam is open book and you can always go back to your notes when you feel lost, having this mental map of where you are and what you are doing really helps to orient you in the exam and throughout your study of the course as a whole. It can change the way that you see connections between topics and help you to understand why you are doing whatever it is that you are doing. This is especially useful in a subject like Admin where many of the topics intertwine (think about things the rule for standing and rule for the presumption of procedural fairness or the link between bias and materiality).
Finally, when making your exam notes, try to keep them as concise as possible. As mentioned earlier, Admin has many long and complicated cases, but there is only limited time in the exam to demonstrate your understanding of the course. You likely won’t have time to re-read and regurgitate lots of lengthy case summaries and that isn’t the purpose of the exam. To demonstrate your understanding, you will be required to show that you know what is and what isn’t important. For this reason, my exam notes ended up being only about one third the length of my semester notes and I think that reducing your semester notes to about a third or a half of their length to make your exam notes is a good rule of thumb.