Although it might not seem this way, knowing how to structure a law essay even before starting the writing process is the key to getting a 1st in your assignment. A clear essay outline helps you to focus on the reading of textbooks and journal articles, saving you a lot of time. It also saves you from waffling and makes you stick to the point, so you don’t have to rewrite the essay several times. If you’re interested in learning how to plan a law essay quickly and effectively, keep reading.
Some guides advise law students to write the introduction to their essays after they have completed the rest of the assignment. But that doesn’t mean that you can leave the planning of the introduction to the last minute. In fact, you should start your essay plan by outlining exactly what you will put in the introduction.
Essay introductions can vary a lot depending on whether you are dealing with a problem question, a general essay question, a specific essay question or a quotation essay question. In general, however, the structure of your introduction should always be similar to the structure below.
In this section you will include a few sentences with basic information about the topic of your essay. The aim of the background part of your introduction is to help the reader understand the context of the assignment question you will be dealing with - if you are working on an essay question. In case of a problem question, your background should simply restate the key facts from the scenario that are linked to the legal issues you will be discussing.
The central argument of your essay should be the core of your essay plan. It is the main opinion about a particular area of law which you will be presenting in your paper. Central arguments are typically included only in essay questions. When dealing with a problem question you will want to instead outline the legal issues you will be discussing in your essay.
Essay outlineThe final task when planning an introduction is to include an outline of the structure of your law paper. The outline should include key arguments that you will be making in the main body of the essay. If your paper is long enough to contain headings within the main body, then you can simply list them here to help the reader understand the order in which they will be discussed.
TIP: For detailed videos on how to write different types of introductions along with examples check out the 1st Class Law Essay Writing Course.
The central argument is the key argument made in your essay. But in order to convince your readers to agree with your central argument your essay should be full of supporting arguments. Typically, an essay of 2,500 words will have around 3-4 supporting arguments, each of which will contain a detailed discussion of the relevant cases and/or statute sections. You will be able to identify the supporting arguments by reading the lecture slides, the textbook and the relevant journal articles on the topic.
If you are dealing with a problem question, then the task of planning out the main body of your essay will be simple. Instead of looking for supporting arguments, all you have to do is identify the legal issues to be discussed in your essay. Alternatively, if there are several persons which you will have to advise in the scenario, you can just identify the names of those persons and structure the main body around the advice for each of them.
Now that you have identified the supporting arguments, your task is to try to arrange them in a way that supports your central argument best. Remember that you are trying to convince your reader to agree with your central argument at the end of reading your essay. Try to think about which of the supporting arguments you would discuss first, second, third etc. to do that in the best possible way. If you are dealing with a problem question, then simply arrange your legal issues in the order in which they show up in the scenario.
The next task is fairly straightforward. All you have to do is come up with a heading for each of your supporting arguments. Headings in your main body should be short and they should contain a clear explanation of what the following paragraphs under the heading are about. The best headings are usually between 3 and 6 words and they simply summarise what the particular supporting argument is all about.
In the case of a problem question essay, each heading should either summarise the legal issue discussed in it or include the name of the person who will be given advice in it. Sometimes these two can be joined together, for example: “Martha’s misrepresentation”.
Finally, after you have come up with the headings you need to reflect on how many paragraphs each heading will contain and what each of those paragraphs will consist of. If you are struggling at this stage to know the exact details of each paragraph, you can simply list the cases and/or statute sections that will be discussed in each paragraph. This will help you to stick to the point once you start writing your essay.
Note: If structuring essays is not your strong side, you might want to consider using the Essay Generator which is a great tool that makes law essay writing easy and effortless.
You should avoid introducing any new supporting arguments in the conclusion of your essay. The task of a conclusion is to merely restate what the essay was about, so that anyone trying to decide whether your essay is relevant to their research can quickly decide this after reading the conclusion.
Of course, in real life it is very unlikely that anyone other than your lecturer will actually read through your essay. But your LLB assignments are meant to prepare you for writing more complex papers, such as LLM and PhD theses or journal articles. For that reason, the same rules apply to writing them. In line with this, the first two sentences of your conclusion should be devoted to restating your central argument in a similar way to which you first mentioned it in the introduction.
Restate key supporting argumentsThe final stage of creating the plan for your law essay is to pick 2 to 3 key supporting arguments that you discussed in the main body of your paper and outline them again. This time, however, you will not be getting into a detailed discussion of how case law or statute sections justify your supporting arguments. You will simply state what those arguments are in about 2 to 3 brief sentences.
