1. How to recognise different law exam questions
To answer a law exam question, you need to recognise what kind of question was asked. If you are in your first year of law school, this will be very difficult. If you are in your later years, you might already be able to recognise the type of question asked. Law exam questions fall into two basic categories: essay-style questions and problem-style questions. Each of them requires a different type of answer, so let's look at them one by one.
How to recognise essay-style exam questions
Essay-style questions usually consist of a sentence to comment on, a proper question with a question mark that you need to answer or a quotation to comment on. The best way to answer this type of question is to evaluate the law, which means to discuss its pros, cons, and complexities. There are three main types of essay-style questions: general essay questions, specific essay questions, and quotation essay questions.
The focus of general essay questions is to evaluate a specific area of law, but you are not asked to address specific issues within that area. A specific essay question asks you to identify a particular area of law and to focus on a specific issue within that area. In quotation essay questions, you are asked to comment on a quote presenting an opinion regarding a particular area of law. If you want to learn more about how to approach each of those types of questions during a law exam, check out my 1st Class Law Exam Revision Course.
How to recognise problem-style exam questions
In a problem-style question, certain circumstances are described in a scenario. The scenario may involve something that happened to one person, or it may involve several people who experienced different things. Answering problem-style questions requires a different approach than answering essay-style questions. When you are dealing with a problem-style scenario, you must first understand how many legal issues there are.
In other words, which of the things mentioned in the scenario require a legal response or action? Imagine you are dealing with a criminal law scenario where somebody wearing a red coat was shot. From a legal point of view, it doesn't matter that they were wearing a red coat. Legal questions in this case include: how exactly the victim was shot and what the shooter was thinking when they fired the gun. In order to determine whether the shooter will be convicted of murder, you will need to consider these factors.
2. How to structure law exam answers
Although it might not seem this way, knowing how to structure a law exam answer even before starting the writing process is the key to getting a 1st in your exam. A clear answer outline can save you a lot of time during the exam. It also saves you from waffling and makes you stick to the point. If you’re interested in learning how to plan your law exam answers quickly and effectively, keep reading.
How to structure the introduction to your exam answer
Background
In this section you will include one sentence with basic information about the topic of your exam answer. If you are working on an essay-style exam question, then the aim of the background part of your introduction is to help the reader understand the context of the exam question you will be dealing with. For problem-style exam questions, your background should simply restate the key facts from the scenario that relate to the legal issues you will address in your exam answer.
Central argument
The main goal of your introduction is to identify the central argument of your exam answer. Your central argument is your main opinion about a particular area of law that you will present in your exam answer.
Essay-style exam questions are typically the only ones that include central arguments. To answer a problem-style exam question, you will need to outline the legal issues you will be discussing in your exam answer.
Structure outline
Your introduction should conclude with an outline of the structure of your exam answer. The outline should include the headings of your exam answer. You can simply list them here to help the reader understand the order in which your arguments will be discussed in your answer.
How to structure the main body of your exam answer
Make a list of key arguments
The central argument is the key argument you are making throughout your exam answer. But in order to convince your readers to agree with your central argument your exam answer should be full of supporting arguments.
Typically, with an exam answer of 1,500 words you will have around 3-4 supporting arguments, each of which will contain a detailed discussion of the relevant cases and/or statute sections.
A problem-style exam question will make it easier for you to plan out the main body of your answer. All you have to do is identify the legal issues you will discuss in your answer and devote one heading to each.
As an alternative, if there are multiple people in the scenario that you will be advising in your law exam answer, dedicate one heading to each of them.
Decide on the order of the key arguments
After you have identified the key arguments in your exam answer, arrange them so that they best support your central argument. The goal of your exam answer is to persuade your readers to agree with your central argument.
Choose which supporting argument you will discuss first, second, third, etc. to best achieve this purpose. If you are dealing with a problem-style exam question, then simply arrange your legal issues in the order in which they show up in the scenario
Come up with headings
Next, we have a fairly straightforward task. For each of your supporting arguments, you simply need to come up with a heading. It is important to keep the headings in your main body brief and to explain what the following paragraphs will discuss. Generally, the best headings are between three and six words, summarising the particular supporting argument.
If you are writing an answer to a problem-style exam question, you should either summarise the legal issue discussed in it or include the name of the person whom you will be advising. The two can sometimes be combined, for example: "Martha's misrepresentation".
NOTE: If structuring essays and exam answers is not your strong side, you might want to consider using the 1st Class Law Essay Generator which is a great tool that makes law essay and exam writing easy and effortless.
How to structure the conclusion of your exam answer
Restate the central argument
In the conclusion of your law exam answer, you should not introduce any new supporting arguments. The purpose of the conclusion is to simply summarise what the exam answer was about.
Consequently, your conclusion should begin by restating your central argument similarly to how it was presented in the introduction. In a problem-style exam answer, you simply state in the first sentence what conclusion you reached regarding each legal issue discussed.
Restate key supporting arguments
After restating the central argument or conclusion regarding each legal issue, the remaining 2-3 sentences of your law exam answer should be devoted to briefly restating 2-3 supporting arguments that you discussed in the main body of your answer.
When dealing with a problem-style exam question, you will use those 2-3 sentences to restate a few reasons why you reached these specific conclusions regarding your legal issues.
3. How to use the legal writing style in law exam answers
Many law students fail to get a first in their exams because they don't follow the legal academic writing style. The result is that their exam answers look unprofessional and are not really academic in nature. This advice will help you to avoid making that mistake. It explains what the legal writing style is, how to use it in your exam answers, and why doing so is important.
What is the legal writing style
The legal writing style is the style typically used by law students, LLM students, PhD students and law academics to write essays, exam answers and journal articles.
Even though there is no one, comprehensive guide to the legal writing style, anyone can learn it by observing the way articles in journals and first class essays and exam answers in law are written.
In all law journals and first-class law essays and exam answers, there are some standard patterns of writing that can be spotted despite the fact that every academic adapts the legal writing style to suit his or her own individual writing style. In order to master the legal writing style, you should look out for those patterns.
There are many different sentence structures and phrases used in legal writing. A few of them are specific to a particular area of law. "Parliamentary supremacy" is commonly used in articles on public and constitutional law, for example.
Other phrases and sentence structures can be applied to any essay or journal article in any field of law. The following sentence structure provides a great introduction to any legal topic in any law area: “This essay will assess whether the law on [...] ”.
It is generally possible to learn the legal writing style by reading around 20-30 journal articles and first-class law essays and analysing their writing style. This means that you can create your own legal writing style guide by analysing several selected journal articles and highlighting similar sentence structures that appear in each of them. The sentence structures can then be categorised according to whether they appear in the introduction, the body, or the conclusion.
TIP: If you would rather follow a ready, step-by-step guide to the legal writing style, check out the 1st Class Law Essay Writing Course which contains several video lectures on this topic.
How to use the legal writing style in law exam answers
As you practice, the legal writing style will become second nature to you. If you train yourself well, then in the process of writing your law exam answers the right phrases and sentence structures will naturally come to you. But it may take you some time to learn how to use this writing style at the beginning of your legal academic writing journey.
Working with an exam answer outline is the best way to learn how to use the legal writing style in your exams, after you have identified the right sentence structures and keywords. In other words, you should prepare a list of cases, statute sections, and key arguments that you will include in your introduction, conclusion, and main body of your exam answer.
Once you have done this, you should copy several sentence structures from the legal writing style guide that you prepared into the exam answer outline, under the headings that best suit them (e.g. introduction, main body, conclusion). As you write the corresponding parts of the exam answer, the outline will remind you to use those sentence structures.
Why use the legal writing style in exam answers
As a law student, you are trained to develop skills that will enable you to write more complex pieces of legal academic writing, such as LLM and PhD dissertations or journal articles. Your lecturers are therefore particularly sensitive to how you apply the legal writing style when marking your exam answers.
The grading rubric at most universities even includes a section requiring the lecturer to assess the "style" of your law exam answers. Accordingly, about 10% of your grade depends solely on how well you applied the legal writing style to your exam answer.
Using the legal writing style in your exam answers can mean the difference between a grade of 60% and 70%. Once you master this style, you can use it in all of your exam answers and improve all your exam grades by as much as 10%.
In other words, it is a great investment in your degree to learn how to apply legal writing style to your exam answers correctly.