Many law students know the cases. Fewer know what to do with them. The difference between a decent law essay and a first-class one is rarely the number of authorities cited – it is the quality of the legal argument built from them. A 2:2 essay tends to know the law and tell you about it. A 2:1 essay applies the law to the question. A first is doing something more interesting than either: it is thinking with the law.
This post is about what that actually looks like on the page, written for students who have already mastered the basic mechanics – paragraph structure, citation, a coherent introduction – and want to understand what their tutors are actually rewarding when they hand out the top marks.
A useful starting point is what the Quality Assurance Agency says law students should be learning to do. The QAA Subject Benchmark Statement for Law (2023) describes the study of law as “the acquisition of legal knowledge, general intellectual skills and certain skills that are specific to the discipline,” developed “by applying these to legal issues and contexts,” with “an understanding of the importance of values and ethics, in theory and practice” treated as central. The single word that does the work in that statement is applying. A strong law essay is not just information; it is disciplined legal thinking applied to a specific question.
A first-class essay answers the actual question
The most common reason a technically competent essay misses a first is that, somewhere around the third paragraph, it stops answering the question and starts answering a different question – usually the one the student wishes had been set, or the one their revision notes were organised around.
Read the question carefully. If it asks whether a doctrine is “satisfactory” or “fit for purpose”, it is asking for evaluation, not a description of the doctrine. If it asks about a tension between two principles, it is asking you to take a view on the tension, not to summarise both principles in turn. If it offers a quotation and invites you to “discuss”, the quotation is a position – you can agree, disagree, or partially agree, but you cannot ignore it and write a general overview of the area.
The fastest diagnostic, when you have finished a draft, is to read the question aloud, then read your introduction aloud, then read your conclusion aloud. If a stranger could not work out from those three things alone what the question was and what you think the answer is, the essay is not yet answering it.
It has a legal argument, not just a topic
A topic is “the law of remoteness in negligence”. An argument is “the Wagon Mound test, refined in Hughes v Lord Advocate and stretched in Jolley v Sutton, has become so flexible that it now decides little – the real work is being done by judicial intuitions about fairness which the foreseeability label conceals.”
You can disagree with that argument. That is the point. An argument is something that could, in principle, be wrong. A topic cannot be wrong; it can only be covered in more or less detail. Markers reward essays that take a position because taking a position is the thing they are trying to teach you to do.
The argument does not have to be radical. It can be that the orthodox view is correct, defended against a recent academic challenge. It can be that two leading cases are easier to reconcile than commentators suggest. It can be that a recent reform has solved one problem and created another. What it cannot be is nothing.
It uses authority with purpose
A 2:2 essay cites cases because cases are what one cites in a law essay. A first-class essay cites a case because that specific case does a specific job in the argument: it establishes a proposition, illustrates the limits of a doctrine, exposes a tension with another case, or shows a court reasoning in a way that supports (or undermines) the point being made.
A useful habit when revising a draft: for each authority you have cited, ask “what is this doing here?” If the honest answer is “showing the marker I have read it”, cut it or replace it with one that earns its place. If the honest answer is “it establishes the rule I am about to apply”, make sure the application is doing more work than the citation. If the honest answer is “it is the leading case and I felt I had to mention it”, consider whether the leading case is actually the most useful authority for your point – sometimes a less famous decision is the one that genuinely supports the argument you are making.
This is also where being precise about the level of authority matters. A first-instance decision is not the Supreme Court. A dissenting judgment is not the ratio. A Law Commission report is not the law. Markers notice when a student blurs these distinctions; markers notice harder when a student handles them with confidence.
It explains why cases matter
A description tells the reader what a case said. An explanation tells the reader why it matters for the question being answered. The gap between the two is where most marks live.
Compare:
In Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562, Lord Atkin held that a manufacturer owed a duty of care to the ultimate consumer of its product, formulating the neighbour principle.
with:
Donoghue matters for this question not because of its result – modern product-liability law has long since been codified – but because of the generality of Lord Atkin’s neighbour principle. By framing duty as a question of reasonable foreseeability rather than a list of recognised relationships, the case made it possible for the courts in Hedley Byrne, Anns and ultimately Caparo to extend duty into purely economic loss, an extension which a narrower ratio would have foreclosed.
The first is accurate. The second is doing legal work.
It deals with counterarguments
A 2:1 essay says what it thinks. A first-class essay says what it thinks having taken seriously the strongest version of the opposite view. This is uncomfortable because it requires you to make the other side’s case before you defeat it. It is also what marks an essay out as the product of a thinking lawyer rather than a confident undergraduate.
The trick is to engage with the strongest counterargument, not a strawman version of it. If you are arguing that R (Miller) v The Prime Minister was correctly decided, the counterargument worth engaging with is not “the courts should stay out of politics” – it is the careful constitutional case that judicial review of prorogation extends justiciability into territory the courts have historically and deliberately avoided. Beating the weak version of the other side’s argument tells the marker that you have not understood it. Beating the strong version tells them you have.
It links doctrine, policy and principle
The QAA benchmark talks about “values and ethics” alongside legal knowledge for a reason. The best law essays move comfortably between three registers:
- Doctrine – what the law currently is, on the authorities.
- Policy – what the law is trying to achieve, and whether it achieves it.
- Principle – what deeper commitments (to rights, to certainty, to the rule of law, to corrective justice, to autonomy) the doctrine reflects or betrays.
A first-class essay does not just do all three; it shows how they connect for the specific question. A doctrinal point about consideration in contract law lands harder when it is tied to a policy view about commercial certainty and a principled view about what bargaining is for. The connections do not need to be laboured. They need to be there.
It avoids descriptive “case dumping”
Case dumping is the recognisable failure mode of the diligent student: paragraph after paragraph of “in X, the court held… in Y, the court held… in Z, the court held…”, with no organising argument that explains why these cases have been assembled in this order. The reader finishes the essay knowing more cases than when they started but unsure what to think about the question.
The cure is not to cite fewer cases. It is to make each case earn its place in the argument. A useful question for every paragraph: if I deleted this paragraph, what would the essay lose? If the answer is “a case”, the paragraph is probably padding. If the answer is “a step in the argument”, keep it.
It concludes, rather than merely stops
A weak conclusion summarises the essay. A first-class conclusion does something more: it states the answer the essay has earned the right to give, acknowledges what the answer depends on, and – where appropriate – points to what would have to change to make the answer different.
It does not introduce new authorities. It does not retreat into vagueness (“there are good arguments on both sides”) having spent two thousand words taking a position. It does not promise what the introduction promised; it delivers it. If the introduction said “this essay will argue X”, the conclusion should be able to say “this essay has argued X, on the basis of A, B and C, subject to the caveat D” – and mean it.
A note on IRAC
For problem questions and shorter pieces, the IRAC structure (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion) is a genuinely useful scaffold. It forces you to identify the legal issue precisely, state the rule with its authority, apply the rule to the facts of the scenario, and conclude on the outcome – rather than blurring those steps together. Variations like ILAC (Issue, Law, Application, Conclusion) and CLEO (Claim, Law, Evaluation, Outcome) do the same work with different labels.
For essay questions – the discursive “discuss”, “critically evaluate”, “to what extent” kind – IRAC is less useful as a top-level structure, because essay questions are not really asking you to resolve a single legal issue against a fixed set of facts. But the underlying discipline still applies inside each section of an essay: state the point you are making, ground it in authority, apply it to the question being asked, and reach a conclusion before moving on. That is IRAC pretending to be something else, and it is still doing real work.
How AI can help – and where it stops
Essay Barrister is built for the drafting stage of this process. Used well, an AI draft can help you:
- Test an argument before you commit to it. Ask for a draft that takes the opposite view to the one you instinctively favour. If your view survives reading a strong version of the other side, it is probably the right view to argue. If it does not, you have just saved yourself the trouble of writing the wrong essay.
- Map the authorities for an area quickly. A first draft can give you a sense of which cases and statutes tend to come up on a given question. You should still go and read the authorities themselves – drafts go wrong on detail, and your marker is not marking the draft – but mapping the territory is much faster than starting from a blank page.
- Pressure-test your structure. A draft that is structurally weak is a draft that is hard to argue with. If you can read the introduction and conclusion and not work out what the argument is, the essay needs rebuilding before it needs polishing. Drafts make those structural problems visible early, when they are still cheap to fix.
- Find the gap in your reasoning. Ask the system to identify the strongest counterargument to your position. If you cannot answer it, you have just found the section of the essay that most needs work.
What an AI draft is not for is producing finished work to hand in. Every university treats unverified AI output submitted as the student’s own analysis as an academic-integrity problem, and rightly so. The cases cited need to be checked against the official sources – legislation.gov.uk for statutes, Find Case Law for judgments – and the argument needs to be yours, in your voice, defending positions you actually hold.
Essay Barrister is designed with that workflow in mind. You can submit your own notes and a sample of your writing style alongside the question, and the draft will be built around the materials you have already gathered and shaped to the way you actually write. The result is a starting point you can argue with, edit, strengthen and own – not a finished product pretending to be your work. The essays are drafted by an AI system, with the underlying writing style developed through work with specialist legal writers – former lecturers, PhDs and LLMs, BPTC-qualified writers, former solicitors and subject specialists – who understand what a first-class law essay actually looks like.
A lower-mark essay describes the law. A stronger essay uses the law. A first-class essay argues with it. Most students have the knowledge for the third category by the time they sit their finals; what they lack is the practice of doing the argumentative work, and the willingness to take a position they can defend. The drafting stage is where that practice happens. Make it count.
