How to Write a Legal Essay for Your Master of Laws Application: Part 2

I elaborated on how to find a topic for a legal essay for your master of laws (LLM) application in Part 1 of this blog post. Here, I'll talk about how to proceed after you've chosen your topic.

Read Extensively on your topic

If you are writing an essay from scratch rather than adapting one of your previous writings, it's an imperative that you reserve a few weeks to a few months for it.

For a legal essay, you'll need to read. You'll need to read a lot. You won't be able to write a high-quality essay without consuming substantial amount of relevant literature on the subject.

To be able to not just understand the key parts of the debate but also converse with the existing literature in the field, you'll need to process, digest, and integrate your reading. It takes time. It doesn't happen on a schedule, and you can't force it.

Assume that you'll need to read 10 to 15 books and articles per 1,000 words of essay, unless you have been instructed otherwise.

When reading, keep in mind that consuming academic works is fundamentally different from reading fiction. The two get confused in the mainstream representation and are often presented as the same thing. An example would be the Harry Potter universe - remember how Hermione Granger reads her textbooks? She just reads them from start to finish. In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Harry joins her in the reading competition, and he does no better. This depiction is entirely unrealistic and simply wrong. If you tried approaching academic books like this, your retention would be close to zero, regardless of how good your memory is.

So what’s the difference?

With fiction, you can read a piece from start to finish at equal speed and not care about sorting through relevant and irrelevant ideas. This approach doesn't work with academic writing.

Textbooks are condensed knowledge, which means that you need to engage with the material quite intensely. By default, everything is supposed to be important. However, when you read them for the purposes of a legal essay, you have to sort ruthlessly through the noise and only focus on what might be relevant for your topic and the argument you are making.

The same applies to monographs and articles. Peer-reviewed articles address topics that their authors found interesting. This may (and most probably will) differ from what you find interesting and important in the context of your essay. You'll therefore have to exercise judgment when deciding on what and how fast to read/ skim/etc.

Finally, you'll need to take notes to make the material usable for an essay. Otherwise you’ll just waste time. A useful guide on how to read academic texts can be found here.

identify a research question or a problem

Based on the literature you analyzed, what’s the question or problem you identified?

There needs to be tension between the status quo and the ideal scenario. For your essay to be effective, you need a conflict, a ‘however’, which you introduce preferably in the 1st paragraph.

People often mistake a research question with something being new or not having been researched. While novelty and absence of research often accompany a legal problem, or a gap, in and of themselves they are not sufficient.

Maybe there is a good reason for there has not being enough research – maybe it's because there is no problem, or that it’s not a problem that can be solved with legal tools.

If there is no problem, there is no reason to care, and you need to explain why people should care about the topic that you’ve chosen for your essay to matter.

When describing a problem, don’t use technical jargon. Most probably, people reading your work will not be experts in your field. If you are to secure admission, your essay needs to be accessible to them as well.

It’s ok to change your question as you do more research on the topic. For instance, if your data shows that there is a better question to ask than the one you started with, don’t hesitate to change it. Change is a natural consequence of the evolution in thinking.

Example: I started my PhD at the European University Institute with a normative question – I asked, in light of proliferation of bodies called ‘international commercial courts’, what an ‘optimal’ design of such a court would be. However, after reading more on the subject I realized that the design depended a lot on the goals of such court, and each court pursued its own goals. That would mean there was no ‘optimality’ generalizable beyond an individual court. I therefore decided to ask a different question, namely why states built international commercial courts, and my research question became about a systematic study of the motivating forces behind international commercial courts.

Outline

An outline is the structure of your argument, the basic skeleton of it.

To produce an outline, describe the essence of each paragraph in one or two sentences.

As a matter of example, the outline for my Oxford and Harvard essays was like this:

• Topic: Season of International Criminal Law –Still On?
• The past few decades have seen the proliferation of international criminal courts and tribunals. Recently, however, their effectiveness has been questioned.
• The available models of international criminal tribunals include purely international tribunals, hybrid tribunals, and internationalized domestic courts. Each has its pros and cons.
• The main drawback of all of them is their ad hoc nature.
• A viable solution would be a permanent hybrid tribunal on the basis of the UN General Assembly.

Write your first draft

If at this stage you already have an idea for how you'd like to start the essay – go for it (just be open to the possibility of changing your opening as your writing develops).

However, if you don't, I suggest skipping the introduction. Leave it to the end. The reason is, it'll be much easier to write it after you've written the body of the essay. The nature of an introduction to any piece of writing is that usually, you only learn how you should have started after you finished it.

So if you don't have a way to start your essay yet, it's perfectly ok. You can write a formulaic introduction, saying what your intention for the essay is, what your core argument is about, and the like. It'll help you concentrate your thinking and free up the resources to work on the most important part of your essay: the body of the argument.

The body of the essay consists of paragraphs whose job is to develop your central argument. As a rule, each paragraph should contain one key idea or one significant claim. For each paragraph, try to stick to one key idea or claim and support it with relevant evidence and examples from your life. That will be enough for a good paragraph.

If you've gone through the stages of reading, planning, and outlining your essay, writing your first draft will largely be a matter of filling in the outline. Expand each of the outline sentences into a paragraph.

A few guidelines I like to follow when writing my first drafts:

• schedule prolonged, uninterrupted bouts of work

When I write a first draft of anything, I aim to finish it as soon as possible. The main reason is that for me, the goal of the first draft is to provide me with the psychological comfort that the major part of the work is done and I'm not working with a blank screen anymore. It helps me shift quickly from an anxious mode of 'omg, what if I won't be able to finish it by the deadline' into a calmer mode of 'ok, now that I've got the basics covered, how can I improve it?'

To get there, I usually schedule several bouts of work, anywhere from 2 to 8 pomodoros (25 minutes each) where I remove as many distractions as possible and just write until I finish a section or the entire thing (depending on the word count and the volume of the piece).

• write more than you need

Aim at writing about 25% more than you need.

You'll always be able to cut it later. But if you focus on writing exactly as much as you need in your first draft, it’s going to slow you down, because you’ll be too aware of what and how much you’re writing. At this stage, it shouldn't be your goal. The goal is to get the words out of your head and onto the page. I suggest concentrating on that in your first draft, and then, in subsequent drafts, you can optimize for the word count.

• refrain from editing

Writing your first draft and editing it are distinct activities that require different mindsets. When writing, you are creating. It is an expansive mode of thinking, where you are inclined to write more and to welcome ideas. The more ideas, the merrier. Editing, on the other hand, requires you to be critical, to delete and to cut the unessential. It requires you discriminate among ideas and let most of them go, leaving just a few. These two mindsets are opposed to each other, and editing usually stifles writing the first draft. When developing your first draft, prioritize writing over editing.

Edit

After you finished the first draft, let it sit for a day or two. Come back fresh, and edit. I'd say that three rounds of editing is the minimum you'll need to do to get to a more or less decent draft.

Read the draft out loud. It'll help you spot inconsistencies in the argument. Ask your friends and colleagues to read it for you and give feedback on it. Get at least one external opinion, preferably more.

I hope this helps and good luck! 😊

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