Citing an employment contract using APA style I am not sure if this is the right community for what I'm looking for, but here goes. I would like to make an APA style citation of an employment contract using LaTeX document generator for personal use. I have found some resources in the Purdue website regarding how to make APA citations of international treaties or other major legal agreements. However I'm not sure if the same is applicable for a simply employment contract between employer and employee. Has anyone ever had to make a proper citation of an employment contract using APA style? If so please let me know what is the proper way of doing it.
There is no worldwide standard for legal citation Each nation uses its own style and citation guide. Most of these will indicate how to reference contracts. However, in most cases they will simply be an ad hoc method of unambiguously identifying the contract “The contract between X and Y for Z entered into on 12 Sometime 1666” or of identifying the documents that evidence the contract. However, none of them use APA. APA is the American Psychological Association style and is used in medical and allied health and is an Author, Year in-line style. Legal citation is universally footnote style. If you want to use APA, a contract would be cited like any other unpublished document.
"Backlogged" has no legal status. Under usual contract terms, all intellectual property you generate as part of your employment belongs to your employer. But "intellectual property" is a category of rights, such as patents, trademarks and copyrights. An idea by itself is not intellectual property. "Wouldn't it be great if ..." cannot be owned by a company. However, specific ideas can be trade secrets, and trade secrets are protected. It's likely that your idea is a trade secret, if the idea applies to the sort of business that your ex-employer is involved in. The fact that it's called promising by the company reiterates that.
Yes. This type of contract is called a license. Lawyers write them.
It is not necessary for an agreement to be verbose and written by a lawyer, for it to be binding. There is some danger in having untrained people writing up agreements (they don't know the distinction between "what the law says" versus "what we had in mind"). The agreement is binding, but their interpretation of the contract language does not automatically prevail. The statement "ALL TUTORS ARE PAID 8 HOURS, unless told otherwise" is slightly problematic since it is not true (you can't pay time, you pay money for time spend). With no other statements about time and payment, and just looking at the words, this says that an employee will be paid for 8 hours work, period. Unless they say something different. That could mean "even if you work 20 hours, you only get paid for 8" (illegal under various labor laws), or it could be "even if you only work 2 hours, you get paid for 8" (the most reasonable interpretation). The interpretation "You are limited to 8 hours of work per pay period / contract" is not a reasonable interpretation: that isn't what the clause says. Such a limit could be clearly expressed ("can work up to 8 hours" is a clear way to state the limit), and since they didn't say anything like that, that is not how the courts will read the clause. They can, however, inform you otherwise, e.g. say "your minimum automatic pay is now 2 hours", or "we will only guarantee 2 hours work", and at that point that's what the number is. Since this is (presumably) a take-it or leave it contract which they wrote up and you didn't actually negotiate, any unclarities are legally interpreted in your favor. If you have worked more than 8 hours and they are using the contract language to argue that you won't be paid for the overage, that is not at all likely to hold up in court. Under terms of the contract (interpreted as stating a minimum guarantee of hours), they can inform you that your new minimum is 0 hours. Also, unless there is some kind of tenure clause, they can terminate the contract at will, and maybe they'll hire you under a different contract. What the terms of employment were for you in the past does not matter, what matters is what the current terms are. If you did not pay attention to the fact that they changed the terms of the agreement as of this quarter, that is not their problem. If they decided to change to "actual hours worked" after the current contract was formed, and they informed you of that fact later, then thereafter that is what the agreement is. Until you are notified of that change, the guaranteed minimum is what it says in the contract. In case their argument is "The university sets this policy, the department made a mistake in not informing you", the university has to take responsibility for the errors of their inferiors.
You can use academic sources when arguing in court if you like, but be aware of the following: Academic texts are not primary sources of law in Jamaica. What is in them may be persuasive but does not bind a court in the same way as statute law or case law. Sometimes, it's appropriate to cite works of legal scholarship to flesh out an argument. If the book contains a succinctly-phrased statement that matches what you want to prove, but prior case law isn't quite as neatly applicable, then you might cite both - subject to points below. Citing the book alone is weaker. At other times, when there is authority on both sides of a point, you might find academic argument tipping the balance, but again not to be used in isolation. Whether a text is persuasive may not be obvious, especially for older works. Sometimes, perhaps often, the law has changed since the book was published. Don't assume that an old book by a famous author will automatically be revered. You can check to see if newer books say something different from the older one, and in general start your search looking backwards from now in order to identify the current state of the law. It is more common these days to see references to current editions of textbooks than comparatively ancient authorities, no matter how illustrious the name of Blackstone might be. If a point of law is not actually contested, then there is no need to argue about it. It can form part of the background material that is agreed on between the parties. Basic principles of the way contracts work don't need elaboration or authority. Judges would prefer to have you limit the number and range of authorities you bring in, because they only have so much time in their day and they don't want to struggle through a lot of unnecessary background reading. In a skeleton argument, the strong preference is for only one principal authority to be mentioned in support of each point of law. You can mention a recent decisive case rather than reciting the entire history of case-law on the topic, and you don't need to include cases where a well-understood precedent was applied without difficulty. It may be that a textbook brings you to the relevant statute or judgement but then that is what you need to cite, not the textbook itself, especially if it simply quotes or restates what is found in the primary material. For filing court documents in general, pay close attention to the Civil Procedure Rules and the Practice Directions, including PD No. 8 of 2020 on the format of the judge's bundle. If the judge is annoyed enough about non-compliance with the court's rules about submissions, then various sanctions are available to them. For example, they can refuse costs on the legal research that led to the preparation of the submission. In correspondence, which I think you allude to, you can be more free than when dealing with the judge's bundle. In a letter to the opposing party you can certainly bring in additional references that you think would be helpful to you as a matter of rhetoric and argumentation. Do note that doesn't mean it is a good idea to make correspondence too aggressive or lengthy. For one thing, a judge can end up reviewing the correspondence and will notice whether or not you are making a good-faith effort to resolve the matter, or at least identify the salient issues to bring to the court.
The German law mandates minimum notice periods for work contracts. But there is no restriction on maximum notice periods, as long as the employee does not have a longer notice period than the employer (§622 BGB de|en). So yes, in theory you could negotiate that the company is not allowed to fire you in the first 4 years. But I would find it unlikely that they would agree to that. When the stock options are really your only reason why you want to avoid getting terminated in the first 4 years, then they are more likely to be open to negotiations about the stock option clause than about the termination clause.
This depends on your employment agreement, if any, with the organization, and on the company's contract with the organization. You can quit your job with the organization, giving whatever notice your contract provides. The company can end its contract on whatever terms that contract permits. Most service contracts specify a fixed term, with renewal possible or in some cases automatic if notice to end the contract is not given by some specified date before the renewal date. But many other arrangements are possible. If no term is specified in the contract, and there is no provision for how much notice is required, then the company should give "reasonable" notice, which will probably be in line with the norms and customs of the industry involved in the relevant country. The specific law of that country may or may not provide a required minimum notice period. The contract between the company and the organization might provide that they would not hire any employees or recent ex-employees of the organization without consent for some period, perhaps a year. If there is such a provision it must be complied with unless it is not enforceable under the law of the jurisdiction. Different jurisdictions have very different attitudes toward such contract provisions. If such a provision were violated, and it was enforceable in the jurisdiction, the company would be liable for damages if the organization choose to enforce its contract. The contract between you and the organization might include a provision that you not leave to become employed (within some time limit) by one of the organization's customers, or perhaps by one you had worked with. If there is such a provision, it might or might not be enforceable in your jurisdiction. If it is enforceable, you must comply or be liable for damages. Even if there are no contract provisions preventing such employment of you by the company, you must not without permission take with you and use for the company's benefit any confidential information that is the property of the organization and is not already known to the company through legitimate means. If you do, both you and the company might be liable for damages under trade secret law. In the absence of any enforceable contractual provisions, and if no confidential information is taken by you, there should be no legal problems. The moral issues I am in no position to offer an opinion on, and are off-topic here anyway. If you were to quit, and the company were to then seek to break its contract because, in your absence the organization could not provide proper service, and you were then to accept employment with they company, and if further the company had known of your plans, both you and the company might be liable for damages to the organization, depending non the details of the law in your jurisdiction. This could be a tort of "interference with a contractual relation" or something of the sort. You should be very careful in agreeing to any such procedure. If there is a question as to whether a provision of a contract between the organization and either you or the company in enforceable, or whether a provision prohibits you leaving the organization to be employed by the company, that would need to be addressed by a lawyer who knows this area of the law in your jurisdiction, and the specifics of the contract, or eventually by a court. It is out of scope for this forum. Nothing in this situation will be a problem if the organization agrees to whatever is done. All possible problems occur only if it does not agree, and claims to have a legal right to prevent it or seek damages.
The written document is given very high priority, so parties will be held to what is in the document. Both parties sign at the bottom, as a way of signalling their agreement with the terms specified in the document. If conditions are added or subtracted (by crossing out), especially with pre-printed forms, the "customer" (person who didn't write the contract) can initial such modifications, as a way of clearly signalling that they indeed agree to the deletion of such-and-such clause. Since both parties have a copy of the signed agreement, this is not strictly necessary. The potential issue would be that an unscrupulous person could cross out a clause after the contract was signed, and claimed that they aren't bound by that clause. A comparison of the two copies would then reveal that the unscrupulous person was attempting fraud. There is nothing special about handwriting in or crossing out conditions, except that it poses a potential evidentiary problem as to what exactly was agreed to, if for example one party threw away their copy and then maintained that the crossed-out clause had not been crossed out. (So, keep your copy). In case you are proposing a scenario where one party is unaware of a change, i.e. at the very last minute Smith crosses something out and signs it, and Jones did not see that happen, then both copies would be the same and Jones would be legally bound to what's in the paper. Smith should announce to Jones that a clause was being deleted. We might suppose that there are innocent reasons why Smith made changes without making an announcement to Jones, in which case the parties do not have an agreement. There may be amicable ways to deal with that situation, but push could come to shove, in which case the written form of the document is generally taken to be the most important piece of evidence (though not always the only admissible evidence, unless you're in Colorado, Florida or Wisconsin).