Law essay writing is challenging in many aspects. Students who have chosen to become professionals in law and legality face various problems, such as overworking, stress, and difficulties in clarifying some knowledge pieces. Instructors and professors can be quite cold and not even care to provide you with law essay examples.
We will happily help you find a way to write a law essay that will win you the best grade. The guide on law school essay writing starts immediately!
Understanding the Basics of Law Essay Writing
The Essence of a Law Essay
What is law essay? Technically, that is an academic paper, usually 3-9 pages long, that elucidates a topic and answers the main question posed in that topic. Regardless of a task's specifics, be it a criminal law paper, a business legal essay, or something else, you have one job here.
Law school essay writing demands your knowledge demonstration, and your #1 task is to show what you have learned during a lecture/course. Yet, there are various secondary tasks, such as showing…
- Analytical skills
- Profound work with facts and evidence
- Fact-checking skills
- Fact systematization skills
- Ability to explain an occurrence/phenomenon/case
- Ability to prioritize points and filter information based on relevance
- Mastery of providing background information effectively
- Research principles (and if they are credible and reliable)
- And your ability to present information clearly and concisely.
All listed skills and abilities are necessary to become a law professional. Hence, law school essay writing is more than merely a boring task to prevent you from playing a new game or chilling with friends. No-no, legal essay writing has its usefulness!
Crafting a Narrative, aka How to Write a Compelling Legal Essay
Stay organized; just start writing, structure, blah-blah-blah. All that general advice is nothing when you want to get a specific answer to "How to write a first-class law essay?" So, here is some PRACTICAL advice.
1️⃣ Narrowing your law essay topic down
Getting interesting and narrowly-focused law topics for essays is as important as writing. That gives you specifics and context for a legal essay, preventing you from going general and saying nothing in one thousand words.
👉 Step 1.1: Decide which foundation interests you most
Two main branches of legal knowledge exist, and these are
- Philosophy of law, aka in which relationships legal knowledge is with other norms and systems, such as politics, ethics, morals, economics, and sociology. The mentioned branch then "grows" and "gets" divided into two new branches: analytical and normative jurisprudence. Pick wisely!
- Legal history, aka tracing the changes this knowledge sphere has undergone and looking into the reasons for those changes. Legal history may also focus on specific regions, asking you to look into ancient, Western, Eastern, European, Islamic, and other laws and how they have evolved.
👉 Step 1.2: Pick a legal theory for more specifics
What interests you most? Will your legal essay focus on jurisprudence in the context of economics? Maybe sociology? Maybe, ius positum is your best pick? Prioritize your interests and choose a theory that has something grabbing your attention.
👉 Step 1.3: Adding a pinch of spicy debate
Your topic will become more interesting when opposing thoughts are discussed. Total antagonism is not obligatory, but there can be arguments that prioritize various angles of vision in one case.
Furthermore, becoming a law professional will make you encounter many opponents, and outsmarting them will be your main goal. So, using law essay writing to prepare for such encounters is only wise.
2️⃣ Research
Oh, that is gonna take some time…
👉 Step 2.1: Preparatory research
Merely type your topic into the search bar and look at how many papers already discuss your question — those can become your sources and references. Also, you might find interesting facts you have not even considered when thinking about your essay writing law assignment.
👉 Step 2.2: Diving deeper
Pick facts you will interpret in your essay writing law assignment and look at argumentation from experts, real practitioners, etc. You can analyze their ideas as well. Of course, you will also have to work with codes, specific laws, and other texts. Gather the most concise and appropriate facts to help you answer your legal essay's main question.
💡 PLEASE!! Note!
DO NOT USE WIKIPEDIA AS A SOURCE, PLEASE. Everyone can edit Wikipedia and Wiki-like websites, and their information is only sometimes accurate. Moreover, such information cannot be impartial in most cases since Wiki editors are not registered researchers who can guarantee objectivity.
👉 Step 2.3: Getting insights from your college/university's repository
If you want to "cheat" in a way that makes you the best student ever 100% safely, check what your mentors publish. Maybe they have essays or research papers with similar topics or something general you can still cite. Your instructors and professors will remember this move.
3️⃣ Planning your law essays
How to write a law paper without a plan? Law school essay writing will be chaos if you do not spend ten minutes thinking of what should go where. Create a simple plan like this:
- Intro: [merely write what you feel will catch your reader's attention best]
- Section 1: Fact 1 means this
- A bridge between sections [write a draft of an idea that connects these sections]
- Section 2: Fact 2 means that + statistics here
- Bridge
- Section N: … + [whatever helps your legal essay be more trustworthy and professional: a citation, a table with some data, etc.]
- Conclusion: The answer to this topic is [your thought based on facts, stats, laws, arguments, etc.]
4️⃣ Actual writing
Write, write, and write according to your plan. Ignore typos: connecting all dots to give your readers a closed answer without ambiguity is the most important thing here.
💡 Important! No plagiarism. Do not steal. Just do not. No one needs ideas someone has already said.
💡 Important 2! Using law essays examples is OKAY. Moreover, they can help you do your paper per the law school essay format.
5️⃣ Editing-proofreading-correcting
Re-read your paper, eliminate inaccuracies, delete/rephrase unclear sentences, and ensure no odd facts distort your masterpiece. It is advisable to re-read your writing result aloud carefully and slowly to notice tone changes and if the word flow is smooth enough.
Giving your law paper to someone for reading is another great tactic because an independent reader can answer if your work is consistent and understandable enough.
Structuring Your Law Essay
The law school essay format regarding structure has more importance than you might think! First and foremost, that is the best information systematization technique because each section of your legal essay is meant to carry specific content.
The Standard Law Essay Format
Nothing too interesting is here, to be honest! Like any other academic paper, you must create an introduction, write several sections answering your topic question (the body), and summarize everything in a short conclusion.
If you write an extended essay writing law assignment (coursework, research paper, or dissertation), your sections will be bigger. They will be called Chapters and carry more facts for a deeper understanding of a legal matter, which is essentially it.
Crafting the Perfect Introduction, Body, and Conclusion
First, how many words are optimal for writing a concise, informative, and best-grade-deserving paper?
Regular college and university essays can be rather short, but the average volume is five or seven pages, yet that also depends if your writing is single or double-spaced. In any case, you are most likely to write a 1300-3000 words paper. So...
- Introduction: 150-250 words (in longer essays like research papers, an intro can be several pages long)
- Body text: 1000-3000+ words (depending on the task volume)
- Conclusion: 150-300 words (just like with the intro, your summary can be 3+ pages long if you write an assignment like a research paper or dissertation).
And here is what you must have in each of those parts!
🖋️ Intro
- Relevance explanation
- Motivation for writing
- Brief background
- One interesting fact (optional; the best case is when that is a big number from statistics)
Everything in that bulleted list is the mythical hook that attracts a reader. Explaining the relevance of your topic, you let a person know that some matter is IMPORTANT and impacts how people live, locally or globally. A topic is likelier to be more relevant when a danger must be eliminated. Still, you can also say that something must be studied or audited better to optimize effectiveness, look at a situation/phenomenon from an unexpected angle, etc.
Sharing your motivation for writing this legal essay, you emphasize that this topic must be discussed better. So, that point is 100% dependent on relevance.
Providing background for your paper equals giving your reader context. In other words, you narrow their attention down to a specific case. Ensure it is clear!
A-a-and giving your reader an interesting fact is not obligatory, but you can instantly demonstrate the profundity of your work by mentioning some statistics, reports, etc. Moreover, that will be a meaningful plus for your grade because your mentor will see that you dug.
🖋️ Body text
- Facts, stats, codes, laws, expert opinions, citations, and other study materials
- Your evaluation and interpretation of those
- The logical connection between those facts
- Argumentation
- Alternative opinions (if any)
- Your sub-verdicts
Here goes everything you have already gathered by researching. Of course, you must also interpret those events/facts to your reader, and they will build their opinion on your thoughts. Basically, you enter a communication act where you explain a phenomenon to a person who already has an opinion (and believe you me, since your reader is your instructor, they have an opinion).
So, you explain everything to guarantee that your reader accepts your…
🖋️ Conclusion
Conclusion, aka summary, is a concise verdict, the final answer you have for that question-topic. That is the ultimate "yes" or "no" that motivates your great audience to generate ideas further.
💡 Pro tip! Do not repeat any argumentation and facts here — that must be in the body. Here lies your final word, not a complex explanation you have already unveiled earlier.
Drawing Inspiration from Examples
Using law essays examples is the best practice to get everything right. You can find many finished assignments like that on the Internet to follow a structure or get a reference for formatting.
You can also buy more specific law essays examples to get ideas for your topics and receive a ready-made narrative. Paid specialists can teach you how to write a compelling essay on legal topics for cheap — visit our main page to learn more.
Final Considerations and Best Practices
Legal Essay's Differences from Standard Essays
Law assignments are… very different from what students usually get to write. First and foremost, legal studies have only some space for opinion, while many other fields have opinion-centered tasks.
Second, you will have to work with many documents and texts. Law is labor-intense when it comes to analysis… No more comments on this.
Third, future legal professionals must communicate information accurately because one ambiguous sentence ruins everything. So, you face the challenge of delivering your ideas concisely, effectively, and clearly.
A-a-and the last major difference is that law means constant debate. While argumentative papers are a genre for other students, argumentation is your profession's nature. So, oratory skills are mandatory here.
Oh… wait. Also, remember that the role of law transforms depending on which science it is contextualized in. Law and sociology is nothing like law and politics — mind that and ensure you know how it functions in this or that "realm."
How to write a first-class law essay paper, given that? Here are some additional tips before goodbyes:
- Always triple-check facts, articles, and statutes. If you work with expert opinion, always check the original text and then analyze the opinion. Do not trust the "expert" badge unthinkingly.
- Stay respectful! Some laws can seem weird and even stupid when you approach that knowledge emotionally. Still, your goal is to remain impartial and blind to emotions altering your perception; logic must take over.
- Embrace the interdisciplinary nature of legal studies.
- Ask for assistance. Ask your friends and family to read your papers or hire a professional to assist you. Not being able to nail an essay is alright; it happens. Do not give up and ask for help.
Topics to Consider
Do you have yet to pick a topic? Long story short, here are some random topics for law paper writing — you can change them how you want!
- The Evolution of Insanity Defense
- Criminal Liability in Cybercrimes
- Freedom of Expression in the Digital Age: How Must It Be Regulated?
- Constitutional Challenges of Surveillance Laws
- The Legal Complexities Surrounding Surrogacy Arrangements
- Same-Sex Marriage and Adoption Laws in 2023: An Evaluation
- Legal Frameworks for Biodiversity Conservation
- Digital Piracy and Copyright Enforcement: The Effectiveness of Legal Measures in 2023
- Legal Pluralism in Indigenous Communities
- Analyzing the Role of Law in Addressing Gender-Based Discrimination
After picking a topic, rephrase it to create a question for which you will find legit answers during your law school essay writing practice.
Final Words
So, how to write a law paper effectively? You have the answer now! Get to writing, stay fair, open your mind to new knowledge horizons, and enjoy your writing sessions. Best of luck with the next law assignment!
