Legal Essay Writing — Guest post by Professor David Kershaw, Dean of LSE Law School
It is an honour for me to welcome Professor David Kershaw, Dean of the Law School of the London School of Economics, to my blog.
Professor Kershaw is one of the most highly regarded law professors in the field of UK and US corporate law. He is also the General Editor of the Modern Law Review and an Associate Tenant at Cornerstone Barristers. He is admitted to the New York Bar and is a qualified UK solicitor. He holds a LLM and SJD from Harvard Law School and a LLB from the University of Warwick.
His post below is full of invaluable insights on legal essay writing.
LEGAL ESSAY WRITING
by Professor David Kershaw
Legal essays, particularly in examinations, often ask you to discuss or evaluate a statement or claim by another person or your professor. In these types of essay, I find it helps to think about the answer as a structured, evidence-based conversation or debate with the statement. The statement or claim will have several component parts, each one of them needs to be evaluated. Commonly, the different components of the statement provide a ready-made structure for your answer. Let the question lead you to this structure; use it to identify the different sections and headings of your answer. Law is a structured discipline; the question is structured, make sure you use that structure.
In this type of question, it is not uncommon for students to treat the statement simply as an invitation to discuss a particular area of the law, and to show-case their knowledge, without close regard to the claims the statement makes. Such an approach is a mistake. The knowledge and understanding you have must be deployed to interrogate the veracity of each component part of the statement. What arguments and evidence can be marshalled to support the claim? What arguments and evidence are available to problematise the claim that is being made? Bring them both to bear, in an ordered and structured way, in order to reach a conclusion on the claim(s) being made.
What is particular difficult in this process is finding the right relationship between the evidence from legal sources and arguments made by commentators, on the one hand, and your own voice on the other. Too much voice and opinion and it can feel like the evidence is being moulded and even distorted by opinion and political preference. And yet, your voice is essential to a good essay. We want to hear why you think the statement, or a part thereof, is right or wrong or a mixture of the two. Just make sure that your strong voice is built on the arguments and evidence that you deploy.
Finally, a note about introductions. A good essay, we have long been told, has an introduction and a conclusion. But a word of caution on them. It’s not always the case with an “evaluate” question that you need much of introduction at all. And when one is useful, students often spend far too long on them. Legal essays will involve word limits or time constraints and there is often a lot to say. Sometimes you need to “cut quickly to the chase” of the detailed argument / “the conversation with the statement”. Don’t dwell too long on the introduction leaving insufficient space or time for the argument.
