All ER 168; ICR 896, EAT

The claimant was sacked by her employer five weeks before she had completed one year's service. In her contract of employment, she was entitled to receive one month's notice. The employer paid her one month's salary in lieu of notice. The Employment Tribunal upheld that she had been wrongfully dismissed because the company had breached its contractual duty by not following the correct disciplinary procedures. The tribunal assessed damages on the basis that, if the company had followed the correct disciplinary procedures,

she would have completed one year's continuous service which would then have entitled her to make a claim for unfair dismissal. The employer appealed.The Employment Appeal Tribunal held that where an employee was dismissed wrongfully for breach of contract before she had acquired the right to claim for unfair dismissal, she had no statutory right to claim unfair dismissal even if, had the correct disciplinary procedures been followed, she would have completed one year's continuous service. Damages for loss following rongful dismissal were limited to the sums that would have been payable under the contract of employment, if the contract had been terminated lawfully. Once the dismissal had happened, it was not relevant to consider what might have happened if the disciplinary procedure had been followed correctly. Although the

employer had acted unfairly in the steps taken leading up to the dismissal, that unfairness did not cause the employee anyloss and there could therefore be no common law claim in respect of it.

Study the words in box a.

1. Use your dictionary to check the meanings.

2. What part of speech is each word?

abolition homicide Involuntary justifiable malice manslaughter murder perpetrator provocation recklessly

Murder

In English law, murder is considered the most serious form of homicide. For the crime of murder to be proved, the perpetrator must have intended to kill, or intended to cause serious injury where death is virtually certain to result. Following the abolition of the death penalty in 1965, the mandatory sentence for murder is

life imprisonment. There are a number of defences to a charge of murder, which can be termed mitigating circumstances. These include self-defence and provocation. There is also the defence of diminished esponsibility which refers to the mental state of the accused at the time of the killing. A successful defence could lead to conviction on the lesser charge of manslaughter.

Put the words into the correct box in the table below, as in the example