Answering law

Nearly everything you are asked to write in a law degree is one of two things. A problem question gives you an invented story — usually a small catastrophe involving named characters — and asks you to advise someone or discuss the parties' liability. An essay gives you a proposition, often a quotation, and asks you to evaluate it.

They reward different skills, and the first exam-room error is answering one as if it were the other. A problem question rewards application: spotting which legal issues the facts raise and working each to a conclusion, exactly as a practitioner would when advising a client. An essay rewards argument: taking a position on a contested question and defending it against the strongest opposing view. Knowing the law is the entry ticket to both; the marks above the entry ticket are for what you do with it.

The method is old, reliable, and non-negotiable in structure even though its labels vary:

1. Take the parties one at a time. Deal with everything about Dan before you say a word about Erin. If asked to advise one party only, still organise by the claims or charges that party faces.
2. Identify each issue the facts raise for that party. An issue is a point where the outcome is genuinely in question — nobody gets marks for solemnly establishing what no one would dispute.
3. State the rule that governs the issue, with its authority — the case or statutory provision that makes it law rather than your opinion.
4. Apply the rule to these facts. This is where most of the marks live and where weak answers go missing. The facts of the problem are not scenery; nearly every odd detail was planted to be used.
5. Conclude on the issue — even if the conclusion is "a court could go either way, but the better view is…". Then move to the next issue, and eventually give overall advice.

You will meet this as IRAC, and tutors may use different letters — ILAC (adding Law), CLEO (Claim, Law, Evaluation, Outcome), and others. Do not be thrown: the letters all encode the same discipline — issue first, law stated with authority, law applied to facts, conclusion reached. Use whichever scheme your tutor prefers and argue about none of them.

A word on what "state the rule with authority" means in practice. Each proposition of law gets its authority attached at the moment you use it: "an accessory must intend to assist or encourage the offence (Jogee)" — rule and case in one breath. One good authority per proposition beats four; the examiner wants to see that you know which case makes the rule law, not that you can list its neighbours. And notice the difference between citing a case and using it: "as in Cheshire" appended to a sentence is decoration, while "the treatment here, like the treatment in Cheshire, responded to the injury the defendant caused, so…" is analysis. The case earns its place when some feature of it is doing work on your facts.

What separates a 2:1 from a first

Competent answers state the right rules and apply them. First-class answers do that and engage with the law's uncertainty instead of pretending it away. Where the law is genuinely unsettled — and problem-setters deliberately build questions on those spots — a first-class answer says so, argues both sides with authority, deals with the awkward facts that cut against its preferred view rather than ignoring them, and still reaches a conclusion. Sitting on the fence is not sophistication; showing the fence exists and then climbing down on one side of it, for stated reasons, is.

The commonest structural failures

• Reciting law without applying it — three accurate paragraphs of doctrine that never touch the facts. This is the single biggest mark-loser in first-year scripts.
• Applying without stating — the mirror image: confident conclusions about Dan's liability with no rule and no authority anywhere. The examiner cannot tell whether you know the law or guessed.
• Treating a problem question as an essay — a general survey of the topic's history and controversies while the parties wait, unadvised.
• Running out of time on the last issue — typically the last defendant, whose issues were worth as much as the first's. Allocation is part of the method, not an afterthought (section 5).

Three habits produce good law essays, and their absence produces the great grey mass of middling ones.

Answer the question actually asked. "The decision in Brown cannot be defended — discuss" is not an invitation to write everything you know about consent. Every paragraph should be doing visible work on the proposition in front of you; if a paragraph would survive unchanged in an answer to a different question, it is not yet an answer to this one.

Have a thesis. Decide what you think — the quotation is right, wrong, or right for the wrong reasons — and let the essay argue it from the first paragraph. A structure of "some say X, others say Y, in conclusion there are many views" describes a debate without joining it, and marks track joining. The strongest essays also take the best opposing argument at full strength and answer it, rather than a convenient weak version.

Engage with academic commentary rather than summarising it. Naming a scholar's view earns little; using it does — deploy it as support, or push back on it, and say why. One argument genuinely wrestled with beats five name-checked.

What that looks like

Take a title of the classic shape: "The criminal law's treatment of consent to harm is incoherent — discuss." The middling answer narrates: what Brown decided, what the exceptions are, what critics say, "in conclusion, there is force in both views". The good answer decides. For instance: agree that the pattern of exceptions resists principle, but argue the incoherence is the tolerable price of a workable rule — then prove you have earned the thesis in three moves. First, show the incoherence honestly at its strongest: the recognised exceptions sit awkwardly together, and the line they draw looks more historical than principled. Second, put the best case against your thesis — that incoherence at the boundary of criminal liability is not tolerable, because people deserve to know when consent protects them — and answer it, perhaps on the ground that certainty in the general rule matters more than tidiness at its edges. Third, conclude on the actual proposition: "incoherent" is half right, and here is precisely which half. Same knowledge as the middling answer; entirely different marks. The difference is a spine of argument, and every paragraph pulling on it.

Legal writing at King's uses OSCOLA. You do not need the whole manual in week one; you need the working core, which is this:

• Citations live in footnotes, marked after the punctuation; the text itself stays clean.
• Cases: italicise the party names, then give the neutral citation where one exists, then the best report: R v Jogee [2016] UKSC 8, [2017] AC 387. Pinpoint to paragraphs in square brackets: [2016] UKSC 8 [87]. Older cases have only a report citation.
• Statutes: short title and year, no comma — Theft Act 1968 — with sections as "s 1(1)". No full stops in abbreviations anywhere: UKSC, not U.K.S.C.
• Books and articles: author, title in italics (books) or single quotes (articles), then the publication details. Copy the pattern from any recent article's footnotes until it is reflex.
• Subsequent references can use a short form with a cross-reference to the first footnote — "(n 4)".

In handwritten exams nobody expects footnotes: name the case in the text, italics-by-underlining if you can, and get the authority next to the rule it supports. OSCOLA proper is for coursework — and coursework marked partly on presentation is the cheapest place in the degree to gain marks.

Use reading time as issue-spotting time. Read the problem twice. On the second pass, list the parties and, against each, every issue the facts raise — the odd details especially. Problem-setters write backwards, from the issues they want examined to facts that raise them, which is why the strange detail is never decoration: the refused transfusion, the second blow, the words said before the punch are each somebody's fifteen minutes of marks. That list is your answer's skeleton and your insurance against discovering a fourth issue with ten minutes left.

Allocate before you write. Divide writing time by the marks: a question worth half the paper gets half the time, and issues within it get rough shares. Make the arithmetic concrete: forty-five minutes for a problem with a homicide issue, a causation issue and an accessory means roughly fifteen minutes each, minus a couple for the final advice — not twenty-five on homicide because you happen to know it best. Write the finish time next to each question and obey it. The first marks on a fresh issue come far faster than the last marks on an exhausted one, so an unstarted issue is the most expensive thing you can leave on the table; examiners can only mark what is on the page, and no brilliance on issue one is transferable to issue three.

Structure visibly. A heading per party, a paragraph per issue. Markers working through hundreds of scripts reward answers that show their shape.

Conclude everything. An issue argued but not concluded reads as unfinished; two lines of conclusion are cheap and always available. If time collapses, switch to numbered points — issue, rule, one line of application, conclusion — for the remaining issues rather than polishing the current paragraph. Ugly completeness outscores elegant absence.

Facts of the kind your Criminal Law paper will use. The heading and short passage above each step name the move being made; the indented passages are the answer itself. The criminal law applied here is mapped in B1.

Step one — parties and issues

Two parties: take Dan completely, then Erin. Dan's issues: (1) is he liable for Victor's death — murder or manslaughter, and which form; (2) does the doctor's error break the chain of causation. Erin's issue: (3) accessory liability for encouraging the punch — and for the death. Notice that the planted details (single punch, "only meant to shut him up", the misread scan, Erin's words) each map onto an issue. That is not an accident; it never is.

Step two — Dan and homicide

Step three — the awkward fact: causation

Step four — Erin

Step five — advise

Read the shape back: issues found from the facts, each rule stated with one authority, the application wrestling with the awkward detail instead of skating it, conclusions reached throughout. That is the whole method. The subjects change; the shape never does.

Two variations to expect. If the rubric says "advise Erin" rather than "advise the parties", the same analysis happens but oriented to her position — Dan's liability gets examined only so far as hers depends on it, and the conclusion is advice she could act on. And if a problem ends "discuss", that is not permission to write an essay: it simply widens the brief to every party and every plausible charge. The discipline holds either way. When in doubt, advise — it is what the whole apparatus exists to produce.