LAW 103-

INTRODUCTION TO
LEGAL WRITING
Session 2: Skills in English Expression
Devotion
• Monday 23rd Aug, 2021.
• Day 1.
• TEXT: Proverbs 17:22.
• A CHEERFUL HEART IS GOOD MEDICINE..
• DEVOTION FOCUS: THE JOY GOD PROVIDES.
• When Marcia’s out in public, she always tries to smile at others. It’s her way of reaching out to people who
might need to see a friendly face. Most of the time, she gets a genuine smile in return. But during a time
when Marcia was mandated to wear a facemask, she realized that people could no longer see her mouth,
thus no one could see her smile. It’s sad, she thought, but I’m not going to stop. Maybe they’ll see in my
eyes that I’m smiling.
• There’s actually a bit of science behind that idea. The muscles for the corners of the mouth and the ones
that make the eyes crinkle can work in tandem. It’s called a Duchenne smile, and it has been described as
“smiling with the eyes.”
• Proverbs reminds us that “a cheerful look brings joy to the heart” and “a cheerful heart is good medicine”
(15:30 nlt; 17:22). Quite often, the smiles of God’s children stem from the supernatural joy we possess. It’s
a gift from God that regularly spills out into our lives, as we encourage people who are carrying heavy
burdens or share with those who are looking for answers to life’s questions. Even when we experience
suffering, our joy can still shine through.
• When life seems dark, choose joy. Let your smile be a window of hope reflecting God’s love and the light of
His presence in your life.
Objectives
• Organize written documents logically based on the issues in a given
case
• Synthesize and explain clearly a complex series of rules, including the
relationship between the rules and between subparts of a rule
• Explain the concepts of thesis paragraphs and research statements
and their function as organizing tools
Introduction
• This chapter explains:
• What is critical reading
• Why do students need to do it?.
• What is the difference between primary and secondary legislation
OBJECTIVE 1
Organize written documents logically based on the issues in a given case
OBJECTIVE 2
Why do students need to do it?
OBJECTIVE 3
What is the difference between primary and secondary legislation?
OBJECTIVE 4
Write an introductory paragraph that sets out the conclusion and
summarizes the reasons for that conclusion
OBJECTIVE 5
Use the organizational structure of umbrella (or main) section and
subsections, and headings and subheadings, where appropriate
Organize written documents logically
based on the issues in a given case
• How you organize your material determines, to a large extent, whether
you effectively communicate your main points to your readers.
• Your first words are important, but they are not necessarily the words you
write first.
• Many memo writers spend too much time crafting the perfect first
paragraph, only to find it needs to be rewritten after they review and
revise their analysis.
• Writing the discussion section is a rethinking process.
• You won't know what you really want to say in the introduction until you
have tested your initial theory against the client's facts and your re-
reading of your research notes.
• Your views on the likelihood of success may strengthen or weaken as
you commit your ideas to paper.
Organize written documents logically
based on the issues in a given case
• Stand in the Reader's Shoes
• Powerful legal writing leads the reader down a well-lit path.
• Your introduction is your well-lit path for the assigning lawyer.
• If you tell it all and tell it well in the first few paragraphs, the assigning
lawyer will know:
•  Why to read the memo – what legal problem is being solved and for
whom.
•  What the predicted outcome is – your conclusion and the facts and
law that support it.
•  What decisions need to be made – what the recommendations are
and the next steps?
• The assigning lawyer is now motivated and primed to read and
understand your discussion and analysis.
Organize written documents logically
based on the issues in a given case
• Stand in the Reader's Shoes
• Powerful legal writing leads the reader down a well-lit path.
• Your introduction is your well-lit path for the assigning lawyer.
• If you tell it all and tell it well in the first few paragraphs, the assigning
lawyer will know:
•  Why to read the memo – what legal problem is being solved and for
whom.
•  What the predicted outcome is – your conclusion and the facts and
law that support it.
•  What decisions need to be made – what the recommendations are
and the next steps?
• The assigning lawyer is now motivated and primed to read and
understand your discussion and analysis.
Organize written documents logically
based on the issues in a given case
• And, if the lawyer reads no further than the introduction – a possibility in
a busy law practice – you still delivered your message.
• Legal readers are impatient and want immediate answers – not a
suspense story.
• A good introduction gives readers a purpose and then helps them read
efficiently and effectively by presenting the key information upfront.
• In less than a page and a half your introduction can:
•  Grab the reader's attention
•  Boil down the facts to the key elements
•  Identify the legal problems addressed
•  State the legal criteria applied
•  Deliver a conclusion
Organize written documents logically
based on the issues in a given case
• How to Analyze a Case Study
• Included in these cases are questions to help you understand and
analyze the case.
• You may, however, be assigned other case studies that do not have
questions.
• This Hands-on Guide presents a structured framework to help you
analyze such cases as well as the case studies in this module.
Knowing how to analyze a case will help you attack virtually any legal
problem.
• A case study helps students learn by immersing them in a real-world
legal scenario where they can act as problem-solvers and decision-
makers.
• The case presents facts about a particular scenario.
Organize written documents logically
based on the issues in a given case
• Students are asked to analyze the case by focusing on the most
important facts and using this information to determine the
opportunities and problems
• Students are then asked to identify alternative courses of action to
deal with the problems they identify.
• A case study analysis must not merely summarize the case.
• It should identify key issues and problems, outline and assess
alternative courses of action, and draw appropriate conclusions.
• At times problem questions can seem daunting as you are faced with
a big scenario with various things happening, and it is not always
easy to know where to begin.
• Once you get the hang of these types of questions, you will find a
really easy way to show off your legal knowledge.
Organize written documents logically
based on the issues in a given case
• Even though every problem question is different, there are some simple
steps that you can follow for any scenario that will help you tackle it in a
simple, clear and effective way.
• Each problem question tells a story about what one or more “characters”
do.
• The student is then asked whether any crimes have been committed in
the story.
• Problem questions are a common way for law students to be tested on
their detailed knowledge of the law.
• This requires students to do three things:
•  Read and understand the story to identify the legal issues;
•  Relate the facts of the problem question to the student’s legal
knowledge and decide on a legal outcome.
Organize written documents logically
based on the issues in a given case
•  Write a clear, concise and comprehensive answer, setting out the
law (with authorities) and explaining how the law applies to the facts
to determine what crimes, if any, have been committed.
• First things first, read the scenario.
• It might sound obvious, but you need to know what you’re up against!
• A quick read will give you an initial idea of the parties involved, and
identify potential issues and how many of them there are – ultimately
it will tell you what you need to do!
• Pay close attention to who you are supposed to be advising or what
you are supposed to be advising about as this will impact everything
you do from this point onwards.
• A good answer will show an ability to apply the law that you have
learned in a practical setting.
Organize written documents logically
based on the issues in a given case
• Something as simple are correctly identifying who you are
advising, instantly shows the marker that you are
engaging in a critical application the law, as opposed to
just listing off all the law relevant to the scenario.
• Now you have done this, you can move on to identify the
parties involved, the issues, and the material facts.
• These are the pieces of information that are crucial in
determining the outcome of the advice you will give.
• For example, below is a typical problem scenario with the
key pieces of information highlighted.
Organize written documents logically
based
• Example:
on the issues in a given case
• Jamie decides to start up a restaurant called Anything-in-a-Sandwich.
Bosworth Bank lends him the money he needs to do so. Jamie must
repay the money by monthly instalments over two years. The restaurant
soon gets into financial difficulties due to the fact that it just was not
possible to hold the stock needed to put anything in a sandwich.
Customer’s requests could not be fulfilled and word spread that Jamie’s
restaurant was not living up to its name. This dramatically reduced the
number of Jamie’s customers. Jamie went back to Bosworth Bank and
explained that he could not make the repayments he owed. He also
made it clear that Anything-in-a-Sandwich was in danger of closing.
Bosworth Bank therefore agreed that Jamie could have an eight-month
period during which he need make no repayments so as to give him time
to sort out his business plan, and he could then make the rest of the
repayments over six years, with no extra interest to pay.
Organize written documents logically
based on the issues in a given case
• Three months later, Desia Adriano, a top Premiership football player,
contacted Jamie and explained that he would like to have exclusive
use of Anything-in-aSandwich that Friday night to celebrate his wife’s
birthday. Jamie realised this publicity would have a useful impact on
his business. He told his staff that if they did their job well on the night
and the event was a success he would pay each of them an
additional £60 in wages for that shift. Jamie also asked his sister
Georgina to help out on the night.
• The evening was a huge success and Jamie was so pleased he
promised his sister Georgina £100 for her efforts. The publicity
resulted in a dramatic increase in business and five months later
Anything-in-a-Sandwich is a huge success; stocking a whole array of
ingredients to fill the sandwiches, and the restaurant is busy every
day of the week.
Organize written documents logically
based on the issues in a given case
• Bosworth Bank is now demanding that Jamie reverts to
repaying the loan under its original terms. That from next
month Jamie must make monthly payments over two years and
must repay the bank in one lump sum the last five monthly
instalments that were due. Jamie does not wish to do this as he
intends to open a second restaurant under the “Anything-in-a-
Sandwich” franchise very shortly and wishes to invest as much
of his own capital as he can. Relations between Jamie and his
staff have deteriorated. His sister Georgina has fallen out with
Jamie after a major row and Jamie is not speaking to her. He
no longer wishes to pay the staff the £60 bonus nor does he
want to pay Georgina the £100. - Advise Jamie.
Organize written documents logically
based on the issues in a given case
• Now that you have pulled out the parties and the key pieces of
information, you can begin to shape a plan for your answer.
• In the context of the example, the question makes it clear that Jamie is
the party we will need to advise.
• So first we need to identify what we are advising him about: what are the
issues?
• At this stage we do not need to worry about being too legally specific, we
just need a general idea of what we need to do.
• It is clear that we will need to tell Jamie three things:
• 1. Does he have to go back to the original agreement with Bosworth
Bank and pay back the last 5 instalments in one lump sum?
• 2. Does he have to pay the staff the £60?
• 3. Does he have to pay Georgina the £100?
Organize written documents logically
based on the issues in a given case
• These three questions will now form the structure of our
answer. These legal issues all need to be split up.
• You might want to set these out under their own
subheadings, but this is up to you.
• You will need to address each of the questions in turn
applying the IRAC formula, and using the facts material to
each so as to enable you to effectively and clearly answer
them.
Situation Analysis and the legal territory
• In many jurisdictions, one problem-solving strategy is to use information
from previous experiences, or cases, in addressing a current problem.
• For this to be effective, it is necessary to be able to find those cases that
are useful in a given problem situation, that is, cases that share salient
features with the situation at hand.
• We use the term situation analysis to describe the process of determining
these salient features in a situation to use in retrieving useful past cases.
• The results of this analysis provide the indices used to retrieve cases,
provide a means to evaluate a retrieved case, and can be used to restrict
the cases examined to those likely to be most useful. p.2).
• Furthermore, this analysis can provide a principled way for using multiple
cases to solve a single problem by partitioning the useful features into
groups that correspond to different parts of the problem.
Situation Analysis and the legal territory
• In the legal domain, situation analysis is a well-known
technique, going under the name issue recognition.
Rule Synthesis with Real Cases
• Rule synthesis is the process of integrating a rule or principle from
several cases.
• It is a skill lawyers and judges use on a daily basis to formulate
effective arguments,) develop jurisprudence, and anticipate future
problems.
• Learning how to synthesize rules is a critical component in training
how to think like lawyers.
• While rule synthesis is normally learnt in legal writing classes it has
application throughout the law school experience.
• Mastering synthesis skills can help students integrate doctrinal
material and succeed on law school exams.
• Many students new to the law have a difficult time grasping how to do
rule synthesis.
Rule Synthesis with Real Cases
• To avoid the process, some pick one promising quotation
from a group of cases and declare it to be their rule of law.
Principles of Rule Synthesis
• Any structured legal argument needs a rule to apply to the facts of the
situation.
• If a lawyer is faced with a single statute that sets forth the rule of law,
the lawyer can simply quote the relevant portion of the statute as the
rule applicable to the issue at hand, the R portion of the IRAC
paradigm.
• The same approach can be used if a single controlling case is directly
on point and dictates the outcome of the problem.
• Stating the rule is not typically that easy. If it derives from a statute,
cases may have interpreted the statutory language, adding to or
changing the rule.
• Frequently, a number of cases will have dealt with the same issue.
• Each case may state and apply the rule just as previous cases had.
Principles of Rule Synthesis
• Alternatively, cases may state the rule differently, apply it differently,
seem to say something entirely different, or overrule prior decisions
implicitly or explicitly.
• These latter situations require rule synthesis.
• Students should not analyze an issue by doing a case-by-case
comparison of the situation at hand with the cases on point.
• That kind of presentation is unsynthesized, and forces the reader to do
what she expected the lawyer to have done for her, which was to read
and analyze a set of cases and to present her with an explanation of how
they tie together.
• To do this—to synthesize a rule—the lawyer must examine the
authorities that have applied a body of law in actual situations, derive
from those applications the key principles of interpretation, and state
those principles as a rule.
Principles of Rule Synthesis
• A rule should meet three criteria.
• First, it should be simply stated—concise enough for the reader to grasp easily.
• Second, it should be readily applied—unambiguous because the terms have
defined, non-circular meanings, specific enough to give guidance for a new set of
facts, but not too narrow to be useful.
• Third, it should be consistent with the cases and law in the jurisdiction—if applied
to the existing cases, the rule would accurately predict the outcome of each.
• Students should remember that they synthesize rules in the first place in order to
predict the outcome of a legal problem they have been asked to address.
• They will be better able to make predictions if the rules they synthesize are easily
understood, readily applied, and consistent with the pertinent authorities.
Principles of Rule Synthesis
• Example
• CARRIERS – INJURY TO PASSENGER
• Where a passenger alighting from train slips on a banana skin, and there is no
evidence as to length of time it had been on platform, he is not entitled to recover.
• Exceptions from superior court, Suffolk county.
• Action by Wilfred H. Goddard against the Boston & Maine Railroad Company for
personal injuries received by falling upon a banana skin lying upon the platform at
defendant’s station at Boston.
• The evidence showed that defendant was a passenger who had just arrived, and
was about the length of the car from where he alighted when he slipped and fell.
There was evidence that there were many passengers on the platform.
• Judgment in favour of defendant, and plaintiff excepts. Exceptions overruled.
• Held: The banana skin upon which the plaintiff stepped and
which caused him to slip may have been dropped within a
minute by one of the persons who was leaving the train.
• It is unnecessary to go further to decide the case.
• Here, the court held that there could be no liability because the
banana peel may have been dropped by a passenger who had
just arrived.
• The students might derive this holding (rule) from the case:
• Rule 1A: A jury may not infer that a defendant was negligent
for failing to remove a banana peel if a “just arrived” passenger
may have dropped it.
Thesis Statement and Paragraph
Development
• Developing Paragraphs
• A paragraph is a group of related sentences that support one main idea.
• In general, paragraphs consist of three parts: the topic sentence, body sentences,
and the concluding or the bridge sentence to the next paragraph or section.
• Paragraphs show where the subdivisions of a research paper begin and end and,
thus, help the reader see the organization of the essay and grasp its main points.
• Importance of Constructing Good Paragraphs
• Paragraphs are the building blocks of papers.
• Without well-written paragraphs that flow logically from one idea to the next and
that inform and help support in some meaningful way the central research
problem being investigated, your paper will not be viewed as credible and, well,
you'll probably receive a poor grade.
Here are some suggestions for common
problems associated with developing
troubleshooting paragraphs
• 1. The paragraph has no controlling idea. Imagine each paragraph as having
three general layers of text. The core content is in the middle. It includes all the
evidence you need to make the point. However, this evidence needs to be
introduced by a topic sentence in some way or your readers don't know what to
do with all the evidence you have given them.
• Therefore, the beginning of the paragraph explains the controlling idea of the
paragraph. The last part of the paragraph tells the reader how the paragraph
relates to the broader argument and often provides a transition to the next idea.
• Once you have mastered the use of topic sentences, you may decide that the
topic sentence for a particular paragraph really should not be the first sentence of
the paragraph. This is fine—the topic sentence can actually go at the beginning,
middle, or end of a paragraph; what's important is that it is there to inform readers
what the main idea of the paragraph is and how it relates back to the broader
thesis of your paper.
• 2. The paragraph has more than one controlling idea. This is the most
common reason why a paragraph is too long.
• If a paragraph is more than a page long, it likely contains more than one
controlling idea.
• In this case, consider eliminating sentences that relate to the second idea, with
the thought that maybe they don't really inform and help support the central
research problem, or split the paragraph into two or more paragraphs, each with
only one controlling idea.
• 3. Transitions are needed within the paragraph.
• You are probably familiar with the idea that transitions may be needed between
paragraphs or sections in a paper.
• Sometimes they are also helpful within the body of a single paragraph. Within a
paragraph, transitions are often single words or short phrases that help to
establish relationships between ideas and to create a logical progression of those
ideas in a paragraph.
• This is especially true within paragraphs that discuss
multiple examples or discuss complex ideas, issues, or
concepts.
Structure and Writing Style
• I. General Structure
• Most paragraphs in an essay parallel the general three-part structure
of each section of a research paper and, by extension, the overall
research paper, with an introduction, a body that includes facts and
analysis, and a conclusion.
• You can see this structure in paragraphs whether they are narrating,
describing, comparing, contrasting, or analyzing information.
• Each part of the paragraph plays an important role in communicating
the meaning you intend to covey to the reader.
• Introduction:
• The first section of a paragraph; should include the topic sentence
and any other sentences at the beginning of the paragraph that give
background information or provide a transition.
Structure and Writing Style
• Body: This follows the introduction; discusses the controlling idea,
facts, arguments, analysis, examples, and other information.
• Conclusion: The final section; summarizes the connections between
the information discussed in the body of the paragraph and the
paragraph’s controlling idea.
• For long paragraphs, you may also want to include a bridge sentence
that introduces the next paragraph or section of the paper.
• In some instances, the bridge sentence can be written in the form of a
question.
• However, use this rhetorical device sparingly, otherwise, ending a lot
of paragraphs with a question to lead into the next paragraph sounds
cumbersome.
Structure and Writing Style
• II. Development and Organization
• Before you can begin to determine what the composition of a particular paragraph
will be, you must consider what is the most important idea that you are trying to
convey to your reader.
• This is the "controlling idea," or the thesis statement from which you compose the
remainder of the paragraph.
• In other words, your paragraphs should remind your reader that there is a
recurrent relationship between your controlling idea and the information in each
paragraph.
• The research problem functions like a seed from which your paper, and your
ideas, will grow.
• The whole process of paragraph development is an organic one—a natural
progression from a seed idea to a full-blown research study where there are
direct, familial relationships in the paper between all of your controlling ideas and
the paragraphs which derive from them
Structure and Writing Style
• The decision about what to put into your paragraphs begins with brainstorming
about how you want to pursue the research problem.
• There are many techniques for brainstorming but whichever one you choose, this
stage of paragraph development cannot be skipped because it lays a foundation
for developing a set of paragraphs [representing a section of your paper] that
describes a specific element of your overall analysis.
• Given these factors, every paragraph in a paper should be:
•  Unified—All of the sentences in a single paragraph should be related to a
single controlling idea [often expressed in the topic sentence of the paragraph].
•  Clearly related to the research problem—The sentences should all refer to
the central idea, or the thesis, of the paper.
•  Coherent—The sentences should be arranged in a logical manner and should
follow a definite plan for development.
Structure and Writing Style
•  Well-developed—Every idea discussed in the
paragraph should be adequately explained and supported
through evidence and details that work together to explain
the paragraph's controlling idea.
Summary
This topic has explained:-

• What critical reading is

• Why students need to do it
• What the difference is between primary and secondary legislation