help with law essay

help with law essay

Importance of Legal Research in Writing a Persuasive Law Essay

1. Introduction

Any kind of research is related to how in-depth and how far back the writer chooses to explore his topic. This should depend on the amount of knowledge a student has on the topic. If he has very little understanding of the topic, he should carry out extensive research. If he has a sound understanding of the topic, he should do minimal research, as his main focus should be the planning and organizing of his arguments and the essay structure.

Research is an important element for the improvement of any type of essay. It expands his knowledge and understanding of his topic, allowing him to produce stronger arguments by finding evidence from several sources. This is what law students should do when writing a persuasive essay. They should choose a primary source from which they will gather information. After that, they should reason and gather information to find their alternative resolutions to the issue. Finally, they should find weaknesses with their resolutions to argue the best possible solution. This, in essence, creates a persuasive argument.

And finally, pre-writing keeps the writer constantly engaged with his topic, helping him explore relevant ideas, issues, and hunches related to his topic. This way he can keep his focus on his prompt throughout the whole process of writing his essay by constantly verifying the correlation of his ideas towards the topic.

Secondly, pre-writing helps in meeting successful achievements in the completion of his essay. It also helps in achieving a more profound understanding of his thoughts and topics.

Firstly, it helps in stimulating the flow of ideas to better the write-up. This is just his initial thoughts on what he will write as his reflective essay.

To write a content, one should have a clear perception about the topic on which he is going to write because pre-writing is an essential and exciting part of the essay writing process. It is important as it helps in three ways.

2. Understanding the Topic

The method of persuasion used in a legal essay is the same as that is used in any other attempt to persuade – the art of convincing an audience to believe something that it does not know to be true. This comes in various forms, rhetorically asking a question, stating a fact or when there is a written or oral submission, a lawyer may say “submitting such and such”. Ultimately, you are aiming to produce an essay that is challenging for the reader because it forces them to think.

The person who is trying to persuade is TRYING to make you change your mind or to get you to do something. Your task is to write a great essay and try to convince your audience that you are right.

The reason for this is that there is often a huge gulf between what is being asked and what the question is REALLY about. The question could be about anything. An essay written on a legal topic is useless if the person who commissioned it has not managed to persuade you to write it, and a judge is only likely to change his mind on a point of law if one of the parties manages to persuade him to do so.

A legal essay is an attempt to interpret and to interpret a legal question. The first step in writing a law essay is to study the question and understand specifically what is being asked. It sounds simple, but answering the question being asked is a complex task.

Understanding the topic is the most crucial activity that needs to be undertaken when it comes to writing a persuasive essay on a legal topic. This activity promises great dividends because it saves time by preventing you from writing on something that is not going to win you a good grade. In your essay on a legal topic, you are essentially being judged on your powers of persuasion. Therefore, your first task is to make sure that you are sufficiently persuasive.

3. Conducting Thorough Legal Research

Laying the findings on the line, Lord Bingham puts it simply as “finding out what the position is”. He goes on to propose several questions to a researcher to find out to what extent they have found out what the position is. It can be established that the more questions that a researcher can answer affirmatively, the more correct will be the conclusion. This is a firm foundation for a good legal argument.

In common law, there is a presumption that existing legal rules and principles are true, and the judicial decisions are based on sound rationale. This means that material resources might only tell a student what the law is and might not tell a student what the law should be. To understand law in depth, one must explore the legal reasoning behind a rule or principle. This can involve studying a complex judgment and looking for information about the judge’s influences, and in more ancient cases, it can be traced through history. This is quite a different task from finding out about a current rule or principle, and in effect, legal research is much broader in scope of what it is trying to achieve.

The purpose of conducting thorough legal research is to find adequate resources in order to construct a persuasive argument. The information found must be relevant and useful, and above all else, it must have authority. A notion can have intuitive appeal, but if it lacks an authority to support it, it will never become a well-developed common law principle. Conversely, authority alone is not enough. One must never assume that a given legislation means what it appears to mean on the surface. Often statutes have hidden meanings, and without exploring the history of a given legislation, one cannot hope to understand an Act to the point where they could effectively argue about it.

4. Organizing and Structuring the Essay

It is an acknowledged fact that many students find legal research very trying. While this may be due to other variables, it is clear that students commonly feel that they have an inadequate understanding of their topic and case. This is before they start trying to write an essay. An essay is destined to fail if the writer does not understand the topic, and the lack of knowledge dissuades the writer from arguing his case to the best of his ability. The importance of fully understanding the essay question and having good knowledge of the area develops from this led paragraph on structuring your argument.

A well-written opening provides the reader with a vivid expectation of what to expect. The main body of the essay provides the reader with clear evidence of your knowledge on the topic, developing your arguments, and providing research to back them up. A recent survey on legal essay writing found that the majority of law students had little idea of the best way to write an essay. At the same time, there was a general consensus that those obtaining a 2:1 / 1st would have found legal research an easier task. The drawback of these students is clear, and it is here that we see the fundamental flaw of those struggling to write well-structured essays.

The primary objective of any sensible article is to deliver what it promises. Organizing and structuring the essay is of utmost importance, especially in a law essay. The fundamental structure for a high-quality essay comprises an opening, a discussion, and a conclusion. It may not sound important, but each corresponds to a different stage in your writing.

5. Crafting a Persuasive Argument

When considering the creation of an argument in the actual written essay, take a step back to recall the purpose of an argument in the first place. It is intended to persuade your reader that the position you have taken is the correct one. This is especially the case in law where the final decision of the courts may be dependent on an act of parliament, a judgement, or even an academic opinion. This therefore means that due to your essay taking the role of a manuscript for a decision maker, it must be written with the intention to persuade, and it is here where good use of legal research can come to the fore. Usually, if you find relevant law that you have discovered in your research, it will have some form of persuasive element as to why it was included into the judiciary. This may have been due to an academic opinion in a textbook or journal, or may have been because the law in question is not settled and there is a gap which your law sought to rectify. By understanding the sources and development of law printed out for you by legal research, you may be able to identify such a gap or instance and use them to highlight an issue and persuade the need for a change in line with your position. This could be a very powerful tool, as arguing a change in the law is equivalent to providing an answer in a problem question type scenario. The rule of law is, however, that there are now stricter methodology provisions in primary legislation, and so where in a criminal case the point of law decided at a magistrate court may have been influenced by a case from the doctrine of stare decisis, the courts now have to change the judgement in order to bring it in line with the said legislation from statute. This provides another good argument scenario as it may be possible to argue differing provisions, which would result in a change of decision at a later date.