Essay Australian Torts Law Essay Writing – Law Assignment Help

Assignment Task

Torts is an area of law that regulates our responsibilities and expectations regarding one another. As such, ‘it affects our expectations of ourselves and of others.’ (Jean Thomas, ‘What interests should Tort Law protect’ (2013) 61 Buffalo Law Review 1, 3.) In this, we should understand the impact of Tort Law as reaching far beyond the courtroom. Recent high profile sexual harassment cases involving lawyers and the judiciary have provoked claims that sexual harassment is widespread in the legal profession. The Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth), s 28A defines sexual harassment as:

[A]n unwelcome sexual advance, unwelcome request for sexual favours or other unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature which makes a person feel offended, humiliated and/or intimidated, where a reasonable person would anticipate that reaction in the circumstances.

Claims of widespread sexual harassment have been substantiated by the Law Council’s National Attrition and Re-engagement Survey (2013) that found that 1 in 4 women have experienced sexual harassment in their legal workplaces. This is not a peculiarly Australian phenomenon. In 2019 the International Bar Association published Us Too? Bullying and Sexual Harassment in the Legal Profession. In this survey of 135 countries, 1 in 3 women and 1 in 14 men reported having been sexually harassed in a work context. Sexual harassment is cited as a key reason why women leave the profession in high numbers. As lawyers we should be concerned by this and the wider prevalence of sexual harassment.
 

The broader social context of sexual harassment is the focus for this 2 part essay question:

1) Critically discuss whether the torts of battery and assault have the potential to address the problem of sexual harassment.

2) With reference to the literature listed below, critically consider why the intentional torts have so far failed to adequately address this problem.