Per incuriam: the decision on the overtime claim in Leung Ka Lau v Hospital Authority

Abdul Majid, Reza Jashen Gul, Sandra Ho, Sunny Sun

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1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

In Leung Ka Lau v Hospital Authority the plaintiffs were doctors who claimed compensation for, inter alia, enforced overtime extracted without pay from them by their employer, the defendants. The Court of First Instance, the Court of Appeal and the Court of Final Appeal dismissed their overtime claims on purely the terms of their contracts of employment. This paper argues that the decisions of all three courts on the overtime claims were made per incuriam because their attention was not drawn to the applicable statutory provisions which would have invalidated the contractual provisions on which the courts rested their decisions. The paper sketches the socio-economic and ethical basis of overtime work and pay before proceeding to analyse the common law (contractual) basis of the judgments, traces the history as well as undertakes construction of the statutory provisions which, if taken into account, would have seen the plaintiffs succeeding.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)697-729
Number of pages33
JournalHong Kong Law Journal
Volume41
Issue numberPART 3
Publication statusPublished - 2011
Externally publishedYes

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