Exam Technique

How to Write a First-Class Law Essay: A Practical Guide

The techniques that separate a 70+ from a 2:1, explained by someone who's been on both sides of the mark scheme.

Most law essays fail not because the student doesn't know the law, but because they've written a summary of it rather than an argument about it. That's the single biggest thing to fix.

What Markers Actually Want

Every mark scheme, whether your university's own rubric or the SQE assessment criteria, is looking for the same things underneath the surface: accurate law, applied to the question, with a critical edge. The descriptor for a first-class answer almost always uses words like "sophisticated", "evaluative", and "independent judgment". Notice what's missing: "comprehensive", "detailed", "thorough". Listing every case you know is not the goal.

Your marker has read fifty versions of the same essay. The ones that score in the low 60s usually have good content but read like a textbook chapter on the topic. The ones that score 72+ read like someone with a point of view, who selected their material deliberately to make an argument.

Keep that in mind throughout everything that follows.

Decoding the Question Before You Write a Word

Spend ten minutes on this. Seriously. Ten minutes of analysis before you write anything is worth more than an extra hour of writing.

Look for three things in every essay question:

1. The legal topic (obvious: negligence, offer and acceptance, unlawful act manslaughter)
2. The specific angle or controversy (less obvious: is the question asking you to assess whether the law is coherent? Whether it's fair? Whether a particular development was justified?)
3. The instruction verb ("critically analyse" is different from "discuss", which is different from "evaluate the extent to which")

"Critically analyse" means you need to expose tensions, weaknesses, or inconsistencies in the law. "Evaluate the extent to which" is asking for a scaled judgment, not a binary one. "Discuss" is the most open, but it still expects a position.

A question like "The neighbour principle in Donoghue v Stevenson was a bold step, but the subsequent development of the duty of care has created more uncertainty than it resolved. Discuss." is not asking you to explain Donoghue v Stevenson. It's asking you to take a position on a century of case law development. Lord Atkin's formulation is your starting point, not your answer.

Write a One-Sentence Answer First

Before you plan your essay, write a single sentence that answers the question. Not a plan. Not bullet points. One sentence.

"The development of duty of care since Donoghue has created genuine uncertainty in novel categories, but this reflects the nature of incremental common law development rather than incoherence."

That is your thesis. Every paragraph you write must either advance that argument or provide the necessary context for it. If a paragraph doesn't do either, cut it.

Structure That Actually Works

Forget the five-paragraph essay from A-level. It's too rigid for the complexity law questions demand. Use this instead:

Introduction (roughly 10% of your word count)

Open by framing the legal controversy or tension the question raises. Identify the relevant area and the specific problem. State your thesis. Don't spend 200 words warming up with "Since time immemorial, the law of tort has grappled with...". Get to the point in the first or second sentence.

A strong intro for the Donoghue question above might open: "Lord Atkin's neighbour principle offered a unifying rationale for negligence liability, but the courts have since retreated from general principle toward a cautious, incremental approach. Whether this creates uncertainty or simply reflects the common law's proper method is the central question this essay addresses."

Two sentences. Thesis established. Move on.

Body (roughly 80%)

Organise your body paragraphs around arguments, not topics. This is the most common structural mistake. Students organise by topic ("first I will discuss Caparo, then Anns, then the three-stage test") when they should organise by argument ("the retreat from Anns reveals a policy-driven inconsistency that the Caparo framework only partially resolved").

Each paragraph should:

• Open with a point (a claim that contributes to your thesis)
• Support it with authority (cases, statute, academic commentary)
• Develop or complicate it (where does the authority sit awkwardly? where is there judicial disagreement?)
• Link it forward or back to your argument

Conclusion (roughly 10%)

Return to your thesis. Have the arguments you've made modified it? Refined it? A first-class conclusion doesn't just repeat the intro; it shows what the analysis has established. Keep it short. If you've made your argument well in the body, you don't need more than a paragraph here.

Using Cases Properly

Here's a rule that will immediately improve your work: cases are evidence for propositions, not the propositions themselves.

Weak: "In Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562, the House of Lords held that a manufacturer owed a duty of care to the ultimate consumer."

Stronger: "The neighbour principle, established in Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562, reflected a deliberate move away from category-based liability toward a unified moral foundation for negligence, though Lord Atkin's formulation raised as many questions about its scope as it answered."

The second version uses the case to make a point. The first version just reports it.

For first-class work, you also need to do something with the cases beyond describing them:

• Compare judicial reasoning across cases. Why did the court in Caparo Industries plc v Dickman [1990] 2 AC 605 step back from the expansive approach in Anns v Merton [1978] AC 728? What does that tell us about the relationship between principle and policy in tort?
• Identify where courts have struggled. The treatment of omissions liability, for example, shows courts relying on artificial distinctions ("acts" vs. "omissions") rather than a coherent principle. Cases like Goldman v Hargrave reveal how difficult it is to apply even a well-established framework consistently.
• Use dissents and academic criticism. Lord Denning's dissent somewhere, a Law Commission report, a leading academic article. These signal that you know the law is contested, not settled.

How Many Cases Do You Need?

Fewer than you think, used better than you currently use them. A 2,000-word essay that deploys eight cases with real analytical depth will outscore one that mentions twenty cases superficially. Pick the cases that best illustrate your argument. If a case doesn't do specific work in your essay, leave it out.

The Critical Analysis Problem

"Be critical" is the most repeated and least explained piece of advice in legal education. Here's what it actually means in practice.

Critical analysis is not:

• Saying the law is "unclear" without explaining why
• Listing academic opinions without evaluating them
• Adding "however" before a paragraph that contradicts the previous one

Critical analysis is:

• Identifying a tension or inconsistency and explaining its cause
• Evaluating whether a judicial justification actually holds up
• Asking whether a rule achieves its stated purpose
• Comparing how different areas of law treat the same problem and asking whether the difference is principled

Take Rylands v Fletcher as an example. A descriptive answer explains the rule and its exceptions. A critical answer asks whether the rule of strict liability for non-natural use of land is coherent after Cambridge Water Co v Eastern Counties Leather [1994] 2 AC 264 and Transco plc v Stockport MBC [2003] 2 AC 1, considers whether "non-natural use" is a workable concept, and takes a position on whether the tort still has a meaningful role or has been so hedged by the courts that it amounts to something close to negligence anyway.

That's a critical argument. It uses cases as evidence for a claim about the law's development.

Academic Commentary: Use It, Don't Just Name-Drop It

Citing a professor's article is not the same as using it. The mark of a first-class student is that they engage with what the commentary says, agree or disagree with it, or use it to sharpen their own argument.

Weak: "As Professor Conaglen has argued, the law in this area is uncertain (Conaglen, 2010)."

Stronger: "Professor Conaglen's argument that the courts have confused the remedial and substantive dimensions of fiduciary duty offers a compelling explanation for why the case law appears inconsistent, though it arguably underweights the pragmatic concerns that drive judicial decisions in commercial contexts."

You've engaged with the argument. You've taken a position on it. That's what markers mean when they say "sophisticated engagement with secondary sources".

If you're on an LLB, your reading lists will point you toward the key articles for each topic. Use them. If you're preparing for SQE1, academic commentary matters less for the assessments themselves, but understanding the debates helps you remember the rules in context.

Paragraph Discipline

Every paragraph should be able to pass this test: if you removed it, would the argument be weaker? If the answer is no, the paragraph shouldn't be there.

A well-disciplined paragraph in a law essay runs roughly 150 to 250 words. Shorter than that and you probably haven't developed the point. Longer than that and you've probably tried to pack two points into one paragraph.

Start paragraphs with your point, not with a case name. Starting with the case means you're letting the authority drive the argument rather than the other way around.

Vary your sentence length. Short sentences create emphasis. A longer sentence that develops a more complex idea, working through the reasoning step by step, can hold the reader's attention if it's clearly constructed and pays off at the end. Alternate between the two. Reading a paragraph of identically-structured sentences is exhausting.

Common Mistakes That Kill Marks

• Narrating the facts of cases at length. Your marker knows the facts. State them in one clause if you need to establish context, then get to the legal point.
• Using "it is submitted" without submitting anything. This phrase has become a tic. Only use it if you're about to say something genuinely contestable.
• Hedging everything. "It could be argued", "some may suggest", "it might be said". Occasionally fine. If every sentence is hedged, you have no argument.
• Saving your thesis for the conclusion. If your reader gets to the end and only then discovers what you were arguing, the essay has failed.
• Misquoting the ratio. Get the ratio right. If you're unsure, go back to the case. A wrong statement of the law in a first-class candidate's essay stands out badly.

Planning Your Time in an Exam

If this is a timed essay rather than coursework, the principles are the same but the execution changes.

Spend 15 minutes planning in an exam for a 45-minute essay question. That sounds like too long. It isn't. Your plan should include your thesis sentence and the main argument each paragraph will make. Write that plan in three to five bullet points, not a mind map. You need to be able to write from it fast.

In a timed exam, a well-structured incomplete essay will outperform a comprehensive but shapeless one. If you're running out of time, prioritise completing your argument over covering more cases.

For SQE2 written tasks, the framing is different again (you're writing for a client or a supervising partner, not a marker), but the discipline of clear argumentation transfers directly.

Putting It Together

Read your draft once and ask: does every paragraph make a point that advances my thesis? Do I describe cases or use them? Does my introduction tell the reader what I'm going to argue, not just what I'm going to discuss?

If you want to test yourself against real questions before your exams, Caselaw's past papers with model answers are a practical way to see what a well-constructed answer actually looks like under timed conditions.