Essential Fundamentals Of Law Essay Writing

Law essay writing format is based on CLEO-Claim, Law, Evaluate, and Outcome. It is a framework used to analysis and answer law essay and examination questions. It will not be effective or enough methodology for you if you lack proper understanding of substantive law. You must know the underlying legal principle that constitutes the raw materials or building blocks for a sound essay. CLEO provides the blueprint for putting those materials together. If you don’t have the building blocks for the essay that is the enough legal knowledge you will not be able to write a law essay that lies in the category of first class. You may have a flawless style prose, but if you fail to provide the understanding of the law materials. The best organizational style in the world will not overcome the lack of knowledge. You will notice the more the substantive knowledge the better the organization and writing become. When you don’t quite know what points to make you waste a lot of time in making vague generalities and common sense (but not necessarily legal) comments. All of your statements may be true as a matter of law. But they may not be sophisticated, insightful and relevant as your examiner would like them to be.

Learning law is a hard work. There is no substitute for reading the texts, attending lectures, and thinking about the legal concept on a daily basis. Though, spending a lot of time in reading textbooks will not guarantee your knowledge of the law. Just as learning to write a law essay is learned skill too, and is the ability to read and understand and summaries of legal materials. Persuasion is the important part of law essays; you have to demonstrate why is you the best course of action, if you cannot do so without the understanding of underlying legal authorities.

There are three types of legal materials:

• Statutes

• Cases

• Legal commentary

Statutes and cases constitute ‘binding’ legal authorities, whereas legal commentary constitutes merely persuasive legal authority. The difference between two types of authority becomes important when you have to decide how to use various legal materials in support of your argument.

Statutes:

In the context of the statues, it not only deals with the laws enacted by the Parliament but also refers to the European legislation and international instruments such as treaties or conventions. It is beyond this article to cover all the international instruments apply within the UK or different ways court can interpret statutory materials. However, some suggestion can be made how to use statutory materials. Students neglect the importance of statutes and are the first source that any lawyer would consider when faced with a legal problem.UK embraces the concept of parliamentary supremacy; therefore, statutes constitutes the supreme law of the land. Though the UK is the common law jurisdiction, the study of law focuses largely on cases in the absence of a statute. However, as it can never replace statutes, students should look further do the statute applies to the question at hand and then identify the extent to which case law should apply.

Pay particular attention to the definition of the statutes, a technical definition of a common word would be given. Note the difference of the term given and compare of two statutes. Define how the term used in one statute by reference to a definition in another enactment. Your lectures and textbooks will identify important parts of statutes Pay close attention to the specific language of the statues. Avoid paraphrasing the statutes and use the exact terms and language in your notes. Highlight and underlining the important passages will save you from writing notes.

You must note the specific statutes:

• Why those phrases are important.
• How they are interpreted or applied by courts.

How they interact with one statute to another statute

• Art of reading involves knowing what issues and controversies are being raised. If you don’t understand the underlying law you won’t be able to answer the question appropriately or you will end up answering what is not asked. To do well you must answer the question as asked and understand the question. The language of the statute is the foundation of your law essay. Secondly, imposing your own organizational structure on the various statutes and cases ensures that you will remember them better. While it can be useful to work from an organizational structure that is given to you, the best to remember the relevant material is to organize it yourself. Because you will spend more time analyzing why and how differently one piece interact with another. How you organize your material is up to you as some prefer a traditional outline, whereas some stick to spider charts. The method doesn’t matter- the work you do is important. You should try to complete these two steps:
• Understanding the  material appropriately,
• Organizing it

You must cut down all the legal information into more manageable. Secondly, you must know the material well to be able to manipulate it.

Cases:

It is as important as statutory law. Cases are important to the student and practicing lawyer for three reasons. First statutes cannot cover every possible situation, in fact, they are supplemented by case law that defines how the statues is applied to the particular circumstances. Secondly, statutes sometimes maintain common law definitions or principles within the language of the enactment. Finally, in common law jurisdiction, there will be stances where no statute applies. Instead, the law will be personified in all of the various cases that have grown up over time.

Learning the law is all about the process of figuring out what is important and why reading cases originally teaches you how to undertake legal reasoning, it also teaches you to how to harmonize and distinguish cases, how to manipulate cases that suits your own purpose, it makes the study of law more interesting, since you are learning to argue creatively and not simply memorizing facts.

To understand and memorizing materials, you must manipulate it in some fashion; therefore you should consider compiling your own case summaries. Summarizing case is the summary of the case. It helps you remember the important elements of judicial opinion so that you can apply later in fact pattern. The case summary does not include all points of facts or law. Include key notes, if suitable. Case summaries are very short.

Good Law writing style- Mandatory element of style:

Good grammar is the key to good communication. We have discussed earlier that your writing style greatly influences the reader. For that you have to be good in grammar in any case. To be good in grammar you must consider the following areas.

• Parts of a sentence: the building block of sentence includes the arts of speech that we have learned very earlier, Noun, Proper noun, Pronoun, Adjective, Verb, Adverb, Gerund, Preposition, and Conjunction.

Clause: A group of words acting together, it has two categories.

Independent Clause: A group of words that can alone as a sentence.

Dependent Clause: A group of words that can’t stand alone as a sentence.

• Constructing a Sentence: As a lawyer, use simple sentences that are very good for effecting but will often use more complex sentences. Good writers vary the length and complexity of the sentence. Use commas when a clause describes the object or action. Do not use commas when the clause identifies the object or action.

• Subject-Verb Agreement: Everyone knows how to conjugate a verb. For example, the verb ‘to be’ is conjugated ‘I am’, ‘you are’, ‘he is’, ‘we are’, ‘they are’. You know when you have two subjects, you use a plural.

• Verbs and Verb Phrases: Sometimes you need to correct mislead modifying clause by including additional words or altering a sentence somewhat, if you keep to the rule of putting modifiers as close to the word which they modify as possible, you will avoid most errors.

• Punctuation: Capitalization: Number of errors, mostly lies under the heading of punctuation. Avoid random capitalization. The Point is does not capitalize nouns, it’s incorrect, but it cause problem in legal practice where capitalized words are used as defined terms.

• Apostrophe: It is used to denote a possessive or stand in place of a missing letter in a contraction. A Possessive is a word that shows ownership.

• Commas, full stops, colons and semicolons: The use of full stops is the mandatory rule of grammar to the extent that you must avoid run-on sentences and sentence fragments. It is used to complete a sentence. Using of commas is a way to express a pause similarly we take a breath in during oral communication. It can be a good rule of thumb to use commas on run on sentence. Sometimes lawyers give a long list of activities or word phrases that contain commas within individual phrases you should consider the use of semicolon, rather than a comma, to separate the different items.

Often the easiest and the best solution to the grammatical problem is to change the sentence structure.