How to write a law essay - the easiest guide to follow

Practicing law is all about reading, writing, and speaking. While we cannot help with your public speaking skills, we know a thing or two about how to write a law essay. Today, we share our basic outlining and writing guide that anyone can follow. Even if you’ve never written a lay essay in your life, you’ll get a solid paper simply by following our tips.  

Law essay structure

It may surprise you, but law essay writing is no different from any other writing assignment. Therefore, it follows the same basic principles. And you can’t get away from the three-part structure, consisting of introduction, body, and conclusion. You can think of it as a three-act movie script to make things easier.

Introduction

The first paragraph is where you introduce your topic and make a claim. It’s just like the first 10 to 20 minutes of a movie, where you meet the characters and understand the main conflict. It’s vital to make your introduction strong and memorable, or your readers won’t want to keep going.

Body

Everything between your introduction and conclusion is the body paragraphs. You can use as many or as few as you want, as long as you meet the word count requirement. Your goal is to keep the “plot” moving, introducing one strong point after another, and supporting it with evidence. The last body paragraph is the culmination. That’s where you make your strongest point, use your most credible evidence. After that, it’s only a slow wind-down till the end of your essay.

Conclusion

After the culmination, all that’s left is a brief summary of your main points. Think of it as a final montage of movie characters living their happily ever after or riding off into the sunset. But a good ending is even more important than a good opening, because it’s what stays with people for the longest time. 

Law essay introduction. How to begin

If you’re sitting at your laptop watching the cursor blink and have no idea how to start composing your essay on law, here’s a quick breakdown of the opening passage:

1. Address your prompt. Introduce your topic with broad strokes. If you don’t know where to start, open by rephrasing the prompt, and you can come up with an exciting hook later.
2. Provide context. Explain why you care about the issue and why others should, as well. Provide relevant evidence or cases that caught your attention and prompted you to write the piece.
3. State your thesis. It’s the core of your introduction and the whole paper, and it must appear in the first paragraph. You can formulate your thesis statement as a one-sentence summary of the main points you want to make in your paper.

By the way, you can skip the introduction and go directly to the body paragraphs, especially if you’re suffering from debilitating writer’s block. Just make sure to have a thesis statement and an outline to guide your writing and avoid veering too far off-topic. 

Law essay body paragraphs - order is everything

The hardest thing about essay writing is making sense of a jumble of ideas floating in your brain. That’s why outlining is critical. It helps you find order in chaos and avoid wasting time on endless rewrites. To make things easier, pick one of these basic outlines to follow:

• Chronological. It’s the easiest for an essay about law, because all you need to do is go from how things used to be to how they are now. Just don’t go too far back into the past. Instead, you can outline the changes in the last 20 or 50 years, highlight improvements, and persistent challenges. You can even add one last paragraph to propose reforms or predictions on how the law will evolve in the future. 
• Thematic. This approach is most effective if your thought process takes you in multiple directions at once. Turn that into an advantage. For example, you can talk about the sociological impact of the norm in one paragraph, about its economic implications in another, and add a third one about how it affects the political climate. Transitions are vital in this approach, so find ways to build “bridges” between your paragraphs, or your essay will come off choppy.

Of course, you can also use familiar compare-and-contrast or problem-and-solution essay styles for legal essays. Just remember to cite credible sources and add extensive analysis, or your papers will read a bit basic. 

Writing a law essay conclusion

You can think of the final paragraph as a quick repetition of everything you’ve just written. It should remind the reader of your thesis statement, revisit the main points, and include a concluding thought or two to stay with your audience. The biggest law essay writing mistake you can make at this point is to introduce new concepts or ideas. If you do, your paper will seem unfinished. So anything really important, you should use throughout the body paragraphs.

5 Pro writing tips

Before you try to put our advice into action and write your legal essay, here are a few more tips our professional writers swear by:

1. Check out law essay samples. You’ll find lots of writing competitions on the American Bar Association or Canadian Bar Association websites with winning entries from previous years. Read a few to know what you should aspire to.
2. Use one paragraph per point. Do not try to squeeze two or more ideas into a single passage, but don’t break up your paragraphs into smaller ones just because “it looks better.” Remember that legal essays are not blog posts, and they should follow different rules. 
3. Don’t confuse paraphrasing with analysis. Your task isn’t to summarize a few random sources, so focus on explaining your reasoning. That’s what professors want to see.
4. Look for inspiration in unusual places. If you can’t come up with an exciting idea, check out our catalog of law essay topics, look for curious news headlines, or use the latest social media trends. Your instructors will appreciate a fresh take. 
5. Know when to ask for help. Don’t wait till the last possible second to get professional help. Get your order in early to snag the best legal writer and the lowest price.

Let us know if you need a helping hand with your law essay writing!