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Academic Writing and Research in Law

• UTS Guide to Writing in Law A highly recommended helpful and comprehensive guide to writing law papers.
• Monash University Guide to Writing in Law Law writing guide with helpful Q&A's and tips for planning out case argumentation.
• University of Queensland Legal Research Essentials Introduction to Legal Research by The University of Queensland, Australia

Other Help:

• Quoting, Paraphrasing, Summarising The basic differences in how to writes quotes, how to write paraphrases, and how to write summaries of the sources you find.

Basic Rules

Academic and professional legal writing requires you to develop an argument and demonstrate relationships between the ideas you are expressing. 

Therefore, the ability to express yourself clearly and accurately is important.  Here you will find information to help you improve your writing for any purpose in your law degree.

Academic writing in law is:

Academic writing in law does not:   

Steps to Writing a Law Essay

Throughout your law degree, you will be expected to write a range of different texts, including research essays, responses to problem questions, and case notes.

Not matter the type of text you are asked to produce for an assignment, make sure you follow these steps:

• Plan :  read the questions carefully and think about how you will answer it
• Research :  read, read and read! Make use of everything available to you - don't forget the library!
• Make thorough notes : include all important (and relevant) details and quotes and take note of the source. Make sure you organise your notes so as to make the writing task easier
• Write the first draft :  before you start writing your first draft, refer back to your initial plan and make any necessary changes now you have done your research and gathered your notes. 
• Review and edit :  remember to proofread your work!

The IRAC Method

IRAC is an acronym that stands for: Issue, Rule, Application, and Conclusion. It functions as a methodology for legal analysis and is used as a framework for organising your answer to an essay question in law school.

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In legal writing, issues are the core of the essay.

This part of the essay should:

• Identify and state the issue
• Name those involved (plaintiff and defendant) and briefly describe their individual issues
• Work out what body of law may govern the resolution of the issue (e.g. Contract Law)

The rule describes which law applies to the issue. The rule should be stated as a general principle, and not a conclusion to the particular case being briefed.

• Outline the legal principles that will be used to address to the issue
• Source legal principles from cases and legislation

The application is the most important and longest part of your answer. It involves applying the Rule to the facts of the issue and demonstrating how those facts do or do not meet the requirements laid down by the rules. Discuss both sides of the case when possible.

• Explain why the plaintiff's claims are or are not justified
• Identify how the law will be used by the plaintiff and defendant to argue their case
• Use relevant cases and legal principles to support your writing
• Do not try to strengthen your argument by leaving out elements or facts that will hurt it

As with all essays, the conclusion is a statement that identifies your answer to the issue.

• Identify what the result of your argument ir, or what it should be
• State who is liable for what and to what extent
• Consider how the plaintiff and defendant could have acted to avoid this legal issue

Useful Links:

• UWA IRAC Guide This guide from the University of Western Australia offers examples of how the IRAC method can be applied to different cases.
• Law School Survival: The IRAC Method A useful site that presents a detailed outline of the IRAC method as well as skeleton outlines.

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How to Write a First-Class Law Essay

Studying law at university entails lots of essay writing. This article takes you through the key steps to writing a top law essay.

Writing a law essay can be a challenging task. As a law student, you’ll be expected to analyse complex legal issues and apply legal principles to real-world scenarios. At the same time, you’ll need to be able to communicate your ideas clearly and persuasively. In this article, we’ll cover some top tips to guide you through the process of planning, researching, structuring and writing a first-class law essay with confidence. 

1. Start In Advance

Give yourself plenty of time to plan, research and write your law essay. Always aim to start your law essay as soon as you have the question. Leaving it until the last minute does not only create unnecessary stress, but it also leaves you insufficient time to write, reference and perfect your work.

2. Understand The Question

Do not begin until you fully comprehend the question. Take the time to read the question carefully and make sure that you understand what it’s asking you to do. Highlight key terms and annotate the question with definitions of key concepts and any questions that you have have. Think about how the question links back to what you’ve learned during your lectures or through your readings.

3. Conduct Thorough Research

Conducting thorough research around your topic is one of the most fundamental parts of the essay writing process. You should aim to use a range of relevant sources, such as cases, academic articles, books and any other legal materials. Ensure that the information you collect is taken from relevant, reliable and up to date sources. Use primary over secondary material as much as possible.

Avoid using outdated laws and obscure blog posts as sources of information. Always aim to choose authoritative sources from experts within the field, such as academics, politicians, lawyers and judges. Using high-quality and authoritative sources and demonstrating profound and critical insight into your topic are what will earn you top marks.

4. Write A Detailed Plan

Once you’ve done your research, it’s time to plan your essay. When writing your plan, you’ll need to create an outline that clearly identifies the main points that you wish to make throughout your article. Try to write down what you wish to achieve in each paragraph, what concepts you want to discuss and arguments you want to make.

Your outline should be organised in a clear, coherent and logical manner to ensure that the person grading your essay can follow your line of thought and arguments easily.  You may also wish to include headings and subheadings to structure your essay effectively This makes it easier when it comes to writing the essay as starting without a plan can get messy. The essay must answer the question and nothing but the question so ensure all of your points relate to it.

Start Writing Like A Lawyer

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5. Write A Compelling Introduction

A great introduction should, firstly, outline the research topic.  The introduction is one of the most crucial parts of the law essay as it sets the tone for the rest of the paper. It should capture the readers attention and provide the background context on the topic. Most importantly, it should state the thesis of your essay.

When writing your introduction, avoid simply repeating the given question. Secondly, create a road map for the reader, letting them know how the essay will approach the question. Your introduction must be concise. The main body of the essay is where you will go into detail.

6. Include A Strong Thesis Statement

Your thesis should clearly set out the argument you are going to be making throughout your essay and should normally go in the introduction. Your thesis should adopt a clear stance rather than being overly general or wishy-washy. To obtain the best grades, you’ll need to show a unique perspective based upon a critical analysis of the topic rather than adopting the most obvious point of view.

Once you’ve conducted your research and had a chance to reflect on your topic, ask yourself whether you can prove your argument within the given word count or whether you would need to adopt a more modest position for your paper. Always have a clear idea of what your thesis statement is before you begin writing the content of your essay. 

7. Present the Counter-argument

To demonstrate your deeper understanding of the topic, it’s important to show your ability to consider the counter-arguments and address them in a careful and reasoned manner. When presenting your counterarguments, aim to depict them in the best possible light, aiming to be fair and reasonable before moving on to your rebuttal. To ensure that your essay is convincing, you will need to have a strong rebuttal that explains why your argument is stronger and more persuasive. This will demonstrate your capacity for critical analysis, showing the reader that you have carefully considered differing perspectives before coming to a well-supported conclusion.

8. End With A Strong Conclusion

Your conclusion is your opportunity to summarise the key points made throughout your essay and to restate the thesis statement in a clear and concise manner.  Avoid simply repeating what has already been mentioned in the body of the essay. For top grades, you should use the conclusion as an opportunity to provide critical reflection and analysis on the topic. You may also wish to share any further insights or recommendations into alternative avenues to consider or implications for further research that could add value to the topic. 

9. Review The Content Of Your Essay

Make sure you factor in time to edit the content of your essay.  Once you’ve finished your first draft, come back to it the next day. Re-read your essay with a critical perspective. Do your arguments make sense? Do your paragraphs flow in a logical manner? You may also consider asking someone to read your paper and give you critical feedback. They may be able to add another perspective you haven’t considered or suggest another research paper that could add value to your essay. 

10. Proofread For Grammatical Mistakes

Once you’re happy with the content of your essay, the last step is to thoroughly proofread your essay for any grammatical errors. Ensure that you take time to ensure that there are no grammar, spelling or punctuation errors as these can be one of the easiest ways to lose marks. You can ask anyone to proofread your paper, as they would not necessarily need to have a legal background – just strong grammar and spelling skills! 

11. Check Submission Guidelines

Before submitting, ensure that your paper conforms with the style, referencing and presentation guidelines set out by your university. This includes the correct font, font size and line spacing as well as elements such as page numbers, table of content etc. Referencing is also incredibly important as you’ll need to make sure that you are following the correct referencing system chosen by your university. Check your university’s guidelines about what the word count is and whether you need to include your student identification number in your essay as well. Be thorough and don’t lose marks for minor reasons!

12. Use Legal Terms Accurately

Always make sure that you are using legal terms accurately throughout your essay. Check an authoritative resource if you are unsure of any definitions. While being sophisticated is great, legal jargon if not used correctly or appropriately can weaken your essay. Aim to be concise and to stick to the point. Don’t use ten words when only two will do.

12. Create a Vocabulary Bank

One recurring piece of advice from seasoned law students is to take note of phrases from books and articles, key definitions or concepts and even quotes from your professors. When it comes to writing your law essay, you will have a whole range of ideas and vocabulary that will help you to develop your understanding and thoughts on a given topic. This will make writing your law essay even easier!

13. Finally, Take Care of Yourself

Last but certainly not least, looking after your health can improve your attitude towards writing your law essay your coursework in general. Sleep, eat, drink and exercise appropriately. Take regular breaks and try not to stress. Do not forget to enjoy writing the essay!

Words by Karen Fulton

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Mastering the Craft: Writing Effective Legal Essays for Law Students

Norma Harris, LawFuel contributor

Welcome to the exciting yet challenging world of legal writing! As a law student, mastering the art of writing legal essays is not just a requirement; it’s a fundamental skill that will serve you throughout your career. This guide is designed to provide you with tips and techniques to excel in crafting compelling legal essays.

Let’s embark on this journey of turning complex legal concepts into coherent and persuasive narratives.

Understanding the Legal Essay

A legal essay is more than just an academic assignment; it’s a critical tool for demonstrating your understanding of legal theories and ability to apply them to real-world scenarios. Unlike other forms of academic writing, legal essays require specific skills, including analyzing legal problems, using legal reasoning, and accurately referencing legal authorities.

For students who find these requirements daunting, seeking assistance from a professional essay writing service can be valuable. These services provide expertise in crafting well-argued and properly referenced legal essays, which can significantly aid in understanding the nuances of legal writing and improving academic performance.

Topic Selection and Analysis

Selecting the perfect topic for your legal essay is a critical first step. It sets the tone for your entire piece and can often determine its success.

Here’s how to make the right choice:

Relevance to Current Legal Discussions: Aim for a topic that is interesting and relevant to current legal debates or recent developments in law. This demonstrates your awareness of the evolving legal landscape.

Personal Interest: Choose a topic that intrigues you. Your enthusiasm will reflect in your writing, making the process more enjoyable and engaging.

Scope and Feasibility: Be realistic about the content of your essay. It’s better to thoroughly explore a more focused topic than to skim the surface of a broader one.

Techniques for Analyzing the Essay Question

Understanding and dissecting the essay question is crucial. Here’s how to break it down:

Identify Key Terms: Look for action words like “analyze,” “discuss,” or “compare.” These verbs define the approach you should take in your essay.

Scope of the Question : Determine the boundaries of the topic. What are you being asked to focus on? This helps in narrowing down your research.

Hidden Questions: Sometimes, essay questions have underlying issues that take time to be apparent. Look for these subtleties to address the question entirely.

Conducting Preliminary Research to Scope the Topic

Start with a broad sweep of the topic:

Initial Readings: Review general texts to understand the background and context of your topic.

Identifying Gaps: Look for areas within the topic that are under-discussed or particularly contentious. These gaps often make for compelling essays.

Research Strategies

Research is the foundation of any legal essay. It informs your arguments and supports your conclusions. Effective research involves:

Comprehensiveness: Ensure you cover all relevant legal aspects of your topic.

Credibility: Use authoritative and reliable sources to back up your arguments.

Identifying and Using Primary and Secondary Legal Sources

Understanding the difference between primary and secondary sources is vital:

Primary Sources: These are the law – statutes, cases, regulations. They form the backbone of your legal arguments.

Secondary Sources: Include legal journals, textbooks, and commentaries. They provide interpretations and critiques of primary sources and help to contextualize your arguments.

Effective Use of Legal Databases and Libraries

Utilize legal databases like Westlaw, LexisNexis, and HeinOnline for access to many legal resources. Libraries, especially law school ones, are invaluable for finding primary and secondary sources.

Maintaining Accuracy and Relevancy in Research

Stay Updated: Laws and legal interpretations change. Make sure your research includes the most current information.

Relevance: Always tie your research back to the central thesis of your essay. Irrelevant information, no matter how interesting, can detract from your argument’s coherence.

Planning and Structuring the Essay

Before diving into writing, it’s essential to plan your essay. An effective outline acts as a roadmap, guiding you through your arguments in a logical sequence. Start by jotting down the main points you intend to cover. Arrange these points in a logical order, ensuring that each one builds upon the last.

Structuring Arguments Logically and Coherently

A legal essay’s strength lies in its arguments’ clarity and logic. Ideally, Each paragraph should begin with a clear topic sentence stating the idea or point you’ll discuss.

This is followed by evidence, such as legal precedents or statutes, and then analysis, where you interpret how this evidence supports your argument. Ensure each paragraph flows smoothly into the next, creating a cohesive narrative throughout your essay.

The Role of Thesis Statements and Topic Sentences

A well-crafted thesis statement at the beginning of your essay sets the tone and direction of your arguments. It should briefly state the main point or opinion that your paper will support. Similarly, topic sentences at the beginning of each paragraph offer a preview of what the section will discuss, tying it back to the thesis statement. 

Balancing Depth and Breadth in Legal Analysis

While depth of analysis is crucial in demonstrating your understanding of the topic, it’s equally important to maintain a breadth of perspective. Avoid tunnel vision by considering various aspects of the legal issue at hand. However, beware of spreading your analysis too thin. 

Legal Argumentation and Analysis

Effective legal argumentation is rooted in logical clarity and supported by evidence. Your arguments should be based on legal principles and facts, not just opinions. Appropriate legal authorities, like statutes or case law, should back up each claim you make. 

Critical Thinking in Legal Analysis

Critical thinking is vital in legal analysis, much like how an ai essay writer free tool assists in generating content by evaluating various parameters. In legal studies, it’s about understanding the law and analyzing how it applies to different situations.

You need to question assumptions, much like an AI tool sifts through data, evaluate evidence critically, and explore the implications of your arguments. This depth of analysis, akin to the intricate processing of a sophisticated AI writer, demonstrates a higher level of understanding and engagement with the subject matter.

Addressing Counterarguments and Alternative Perspectives

A comprehensive legal essay anticipates and addresses potential counterarguments. Acknowledging and responding to opposing viewpoints strengthens your essay by demonstrating that you have considered the issue from all angles. It shows the ability to engage critically with different perspectives, a vital skill in legal analysis.

Incorporating Legal Precedents and Statutory Materials

Your arguments should be grounded in relevant legal precedents and statutory materials. Citing these sources provides evidence to support your points and shows your ability to interpret and apply legal concepts. Explain how these sources relate to your argument, rather than simply listing them, to demonstrate your analytical skills.

Legal Writing Style and Language

Clear and concise writing is paramount in legal essays. The goal is to communicate complex legal ideas in a way that is accessible and understandable. This means avoiding unnecessary jargon, wordy sentences, and convoluted structures.

Each sentence should convey your point directly and efficiently. Clarity is key in legal writing; you aim to make your argument as straightforward and understandable as possible.

Avoiding Common Pitfalls in Legal Language

Legal language is often criticized for being overly complex. Avoid these common pitfalls by simplifying your language. Avoid the passive voice, which can obscure the meaning and make your writing less engaging. Also, resist the temptation to use legal terms unnecessarily; use plain English wherever possible to convey your points more clearly.

Use of Legal Terminology and Phrases

While simplicity is essential, there are times when specific legal terminology is necessary to convey a concept accurately.

In such cases, ensure you fully understand and use the terms correctly. This demonstrates your knowledge and ensures that your argument is legally sound. However, always explain the time briefly to readers who may need to become more familiar with it.

Balancing Technicality with Readability

The ultimate goal is to strike a balance between technical accuracy and readability. Your essay should demonstrate your legal knowledge and ability to use legal language correctly, but someone without a legal background should easily understand it.

Citation and Referencing in Legal Essays

Accurate citation is crucial in legal essays. It serves two primary purposes: it credits the original authors of the work and allows readers to verify your sources. This not only bolsters your credibility but also ensures academic integrity. Please cite sources to avoid accusations of plagiarism, which can have serious consequences.

Overview of Common Citation Styles in Law

Different jurisdictions and law schools may prefer different citation styles. The Bluebook and OSCOLA are among the most commonly used.

The Bluebook, prevalent in the United States, provides a uniform citation system. OSCOLA, mainly used in the UK, is designed for legal referencing. Familiarize yourself with the preferred style for your jurisdiction or institution to ensure correct citations.

Avoiding Plagiarism and Ensuring Academic Integrity

To avoid plagiarism, ensure that every source you use is properly cited. This includes direct quotes as well as paraphrased ideas and information. Understanding and adhering to the rules of your chosen citation style is vital to maintaining academic integrity.

Editing and Proofreading

Editing is an essential step in the writing process . Begin by reviewing your essay for structure and content. Make sure each argument is coherent and supported by evidence. Then, move on to sentence-level edits, focusing on clarity and conciseness. Look out for and eliminate any grammatical errors or awkward phrasings.

Seeking Feedback and Constructive Criticism

Don’t hesitate to seek feedback from peers, mentors, or professors. Fresh eyes can catch errors you might have missed and provide valuable insights on improving your essay. Constructive criticism is a powerful tool for enhancing your legal writing skills.

From selecting a compelling topic and conducting thorough research to crafting clear, coherent arguments and ensuring accurate citations, each aspect of your legal essay is a stepping stone towards demonstrating your proficiency in law.

Remember, effective legal writing is not just about showcasing your understanding of the law; it’s about communicating complex ideas, concisely, and persuasively. As you apply these tips and techniques, you will not only enhance your legal writing skills but also deepen your understanding of the law itself.

Embrace the challenge, seek feedback, and continually refine your skills. Your journey in mastering legal essays is not just about academic success; it’s about preparing for a rewarding legal career.

About The Author

Norma Harris

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How to Write a Law Essay: Full Guide

Table of Contents

Introduction to Law Essays

What is a law essay.

A law essay is a scholarly piece of writing which presents a legal analysis, argument, or discussion on a particular legal issue or topic. It requires a student or legal professional to present a well-reasoned argument based on legal principles and evidence.

Importance of Clarity, Structure, and Argumentation

Clarity and structure are paramount in a law essay as they facilitate the reader’s understanding. Argumentation is the vehicle through which the writer conveys their analysis, employing logic and legal reasoning to persuade the reader of their viewpoint.

Understanding the Question

Breaking down the essay question.

• Read Carefully : Understand what the question asks of you.
• Highlight Key Terms : Identify action words and legal concepts.
• Clarify Uncertainties : If any part of the question is unclear, seek clarification.

Identifying Key Terms and Issues

• Definition of Terms : Define legal terms to set the parameters of your essay.
• Issues to Address : Distinguish the main issues that will form the crux of your argument.

Research Techniques

Primary vs. secondary sources of law.

• Primary Sources : These are texts of law themselves, such as statutes, cases, regulations.
• Secondary Sources : These include academic articles, textbooks, and legal commentaries that provide analysis of primary sources.

Utilizing Law Libraries and Online Databases Effectively

• Law Libraries : Offer comprehensive access to physical and digital legal resources.
• Online Databases : Platforms like Westlaw or LexisNexis provide extensive legal databases for research.

Structuring the Essay

The significance of a clear introduction, body, and conclusion.

• Introduction : Outlines the issue, states the thesis, and describes the structure of the essay.
• Body : Presents arguments in a logical sequence, each supported by evidence and analysis.
• Conclusion : Summarizes the main points and restates the thesis in light of the arguments presented.

How to Outline Arguments Logically and Coherently

• Point, Evidence, Explanation : For each argument, state your point, back it with evidence, and explain its relevance.
• Logical Flow : Ensure each argument naturally leads to the next.
• Coherence : Make sure all parts of the essay work together to support the thesis.

Legal Argumentation

Developing arguments and counter-arguments.

• Constructing Your Argument : Develop a clear, concise thesis statement and support it with legal reasoning and evidence.
• Anticipating Counter-Arguments : Identify potential opposing views and prepare rebuttals to strengthen your position.
• Using Precedent : Analyze case law to support your argument, showing how past decisions apply to your issue.
• Statutory Interpretation : Use the rules of interpretation to argue how legislation should be applied to your case.

Referencing and Citations

Proper use of a legal citation guide.

• Choosing a Citation Style : Adhere to the prescribed citation style, such as OSCOLA or Bluebook.
• Consistency : Be consistent in formatting all your citations according to the chosen guide.

Avoiding Plagiarism and Paraphrasing

• Originality : Always credit original authors for their ideas.
• Paraphrasing : Learn to paraphrase legal concepts accurately without changing their meaning.

Writing Style and Language

Appropriate language for legal writing.

• Formality : Use a formal tone that reflects the seriousness of the subject matter.
• Precision : Choose words that convey your meaning precisely.

Clarity in Argumentation

• Avoiding Legalese : Use plain language where possible to make your writing accessible.
• Simplicity : Complex ideas should be broken down into simple, understandable statements.

Editing and Proofreading

Techniques for effective editing.

• Structure : Check that your essay has a clear introduction, body, and conclusion.
• Clarity : Remove any ambiguity and ensure your points are clear and concise.

Importance of Feedback

• Peer Review : Have peers or mentors review your work to gain different perspectives.
• Incorporate Feedback : Use constructive criticism to refine and strengthen your essay.

Summarizing Arguments

• Restate Key Points : Briefly summarize the main arguments of your essay.
• Conciseness : Keep your conclusion short and to the point, avoiding the introduction of new information.

Reiterating the Response to the Essay Question

• Answer the Question : Clearly state how your essay has addressed the central question.
• Closing Statement : End with a strong closing statement that encapsulates the essence of your argument.

In crafting your law essay, integrating these elements of legal argumentation, proper referencing, careful language choice, and diligent editing will contribute to a persuasive and scholarly piece of writing. Always remember to answer the essay question directly and fully, using a structured argument supported by legal sources and your own critical analysis.

How To Write Law Essay?

23 October, 2020

8 minutes read

Author:  Elizabeth Brown

If you are a law student, you have probably already faced the question of how to write an essay on this discipline. This is not an easy task because the requirements for a law essay often differ. In addition, you need to state your position and back it up with arguments clearly for others to understand. And to help you facilitate this process, we offer some preparation tips and tricks so that you could craft a decent work.

First things first, let’s discuss the legal essay scheme. It is rightly similar to the social science essay scheme. In both papers, it is necessary to explain a position on a particular issue or comment on a statement. For university law essay, especially in cases of specialties, it’s more complicated. There are several legal essay types :

• essay on quote explanation . Like in a school essay, the task here is to reveal the meaning of the expression and give a reasoned agreement or disagreement with it.
• essay on legal theory. The essence of this task is to describe one of the theories of law or any jurisprudence. This can be anything – for example, the theory that touches the Fifth Amendment.
• jurisprudence essay. In this assignment, you should review a specific case study or analyze the given document. Here, it’s important to adhere to special structure: first read the case, comprehend it, and only then give a critical account of this or that piece.

Law Essay Outline

The outline is one of the essential parts of law essay writing. At the point of creating it, you should jot down the structure of the main argument for each and every statement you deem appropriate for a text. This way, it’ll be much easier for you to organize the legal paper and facilitate its readability . 

For example, if you need to comment on the quotation, it’s better to start an essay with brief information about the author. Then, consider the meaning of the citation in the context of his time and compare it to current conditions, as well as note whether you agree with the statement or not. Remember – the main task is to have a solid opinion in which you’re 100% confident. If not, switch the quote.

In the essay on legal theory, state the history of the issue, highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the case you are analyzing. Try to draw a parallel with the present, to indicate how relevant it is now for contemporary law students.

While reviewing a specific legal case or document, you should not be distracted by elements irrelevant or unrelated to the subject and give descriptions of similar situations. Consistently assess the actions of subjects or conduct an in-depth analysis of the provided regulation.

Write all of the crucial points in a short plan and shorten the above information into a couple of sentences. Afterward, you’ll be ready to use the crafted outline and write a law essay according to its key points . 

Law Essay Structure

1. Introduction

Like any other type of writing, law essays start with introduction. A successful lead in is the one that captures attention instantly and forces readers to become interested in the law topic. In the beginning, you’ll need to clearly and precisely formulate a thesis statement of the entire piece, which you will then reveal in the following text. A great way to elaborate mediocre introduction with engaging filling is to state a concrete problem, controversy or issue that needs to be resolved.  

2. Main part

This is the main element of the whole legal essay. It should contain an analysis of the quotation, legal theory, specific case, or document. Plus, your opinions about this or that aspect should be argued: for example, by references to other papers or practices. Another beneficial way to develop the main body of your essay is to use specific examples from law classes, including activities and important discussions , if applicable. Also, don’t forget that your law essay should always follow the thesis and develop it throughout the legal paper. This is a critical point to consider, as any departure from the established scheme will distort your work’s content.

3. Conclusion

Your finishing remarks should formulate the outcome of what was written above. A reasonable conclusion should be brief and powerful , as well as connected to the introduction. Besides, a good ending should contain a thesis of the whole law essay. However, don’t try to repeat your thesis word by word. Consider rephrasing it instead of mentioning the same statements so that the information is more easily digested for readers. Plus, you’ll need to provide a critical analysis of your work. For this, explain why your main argument backed up by primary and secondary sources is the highest point of conviction. Hence, your readers will see explicit reasoning and be more inclined to believe the truth you outlined in the paper. 

4. Bibliography

A bibliography is a mandatory part of the work, and also the last one. At the end of your essay, you should list the documents (laws and other regulations) and books that were used in preparation for the article. Works cited page will help you validate the credibility of work and show readers that all statements and opinions are proven with relevant evidence. However, it doesn’t mean that your bibliography ought to be inserted just after you’ve written the entire text. To have a better vision of what source to pick for citing, include the list of used materials before writing the final version of your law essay. Accordingly, you’ll see sources in their entirety and easily cite them whenever needed. 

The sayings of influential and famous people imbue any work with an air of authority . This is especially true for essays on law: professors appreciate it when students reinforce their considerations with the opinion of leaders and experts in their field.

Quotes for an essay on law are quite easy to find on the Internet or specialized digests.

If you choose to close the paper with a quote, it’ll be a great hook which will keep readers impressed by the essay long after they digest it. But feel free to add meaningful sayings also in the introduction or in the middle of a paper. Either way, quotes are a tool that helps make your reading highly impactful and appreciated.  

These were the top advice on how to create a distinct law paper. We hope our advice will help you prepare an interesting and informative essay for college or university studies that’ll be graded with the highest mark. Once you manage to operate on the subtle art of legal essay writing, you’ll adjust to the complexities of its realization without difficulties. If you’re in doubt questioning your writing abilities, use custom essay writer service – we will create the best law essay tailored specifically for you.

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Teaching & Learning

Legal writing in focus.

As a lawyer, teacher, and director for the past 14 years of Harvard Law School’s First-Year Legal Research and Writing Program, Susannah Barton Tobin ’04 sees a lot of legal writing, some good, some less good. But she doesn’t entirely agree with the framing of a recent article in The Economist titled, “Why legal writing is so awful,” discussing a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which the authors blamed the continuing use of “arcane” and “archaic” legal lingo, in part, on what they perceived as lawyers’ tendency to imitate their predecessors’ poor prose.  

Armed with two degrees in classics, a J.D. from Harvard Law, and years of writing and teaching experience, Tobin recently spoke to Harvard Law Today about the study and offered a few tips for new law students, long-time legal practitioners, and aspiring writers of all stripes. Above all, she says, before you open your laptop or pick up your pen, know your audience and what you are trying to achieve.

Harvard Law Today: Is legal writing as bad as The Economist and the study argue, or does it get a bad rap?

Susannah Barton Tobin: Legal writing has had a bad rap for as long as I can remember being involved in it, as a reader, as a student, and as a practitioner. But as a teacher, I think legal writing is writing. There’s good writing, and there’s bad writing, and there’s middling writing. And what we’re trying to do when we teach students how to write is to help them communicate as effectively as possible with the audience they’re trying to reach and with the particular purpose they have in mind.

I agree with the hypothesis that there’s path dependency bound up in legal writing, and particularly in the United States, where our common law tradition makes us want to stick with what has worked. But a simpler reason why some legal writing is bad is the same reason why some non-legal writing is bad: Writing well takes a lot of time and patience, particularly when you’re trying to explain complicated ideas, which lawyers almost always are trying to do.

HLT: Does it matter if legal writing is good writing ?

Tobin: I teach legal writing, so of course I think it matters. It is advantageous for students and young attorneys to be known as good legal writers. Being able to explain what the law says and how it works in a clear and honest way is an essential skill to being a good lawyer and a good citizen in the democracy. From a professional perspective, you advance further, faster if you’re known to be a reliably strong legal writer.

HLT: Where do you see bad legal writing the most?

Tobin: The two categories the study emphasized were contracts and statutory language. And it makes sense why those would be where you would start. They’re both notably long and complicated. A lot of cooks are involved, particularly with legislation, where you have lawmakers and lobbyists and all kinds of feedback and last-minute changes. There’s a great quote from [former U.S. Senator from Wisconsin] Russ Feingold ’79, after he was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act. When they asked him why he had voted no, he said “Because I read it.” That was a particularly political point. But it speaks to the fact that nobody’s able to sit down and read these legislative documents start to finish. Is Congress trying to create something that people are going to read and be able to understand? I’m not sure that’s really what is happening anymore with legislation. So, is that a feature or a bug? It may be a feature for the people trying to pass the law, but it’s a huge bug for people who are trying to figure out what’s going on.

HLT: Where do you see the best legal writing?

Tobin: Brief writing, particularly at the highest levels of the federal courts, is where you see some of the best writing, partially because the stakes of the disputes are so high and so publicly salient. When my students are looking for good legal writing, I encourage them to read briefs that are coming out of the Office of the Solicitor General, briefs that are coming out of nonprofits and firms that practice regularly before the Supreme Court.

HLT: So, it sounds like a lot of this comes down to, as most writing does, a question of audience?

Tobin: I think that’s exactly right. And that’s why I’m not a big fan of the idea that legal writing is a totally separate animal from any other writing. If you haven’t thought about your audience, then why are you doing the writing? A former editorial writer for The New York Times, Verlyn Klinkenborg, wrote this really helpful book called “Several Short Sentences About Writing.” And he’s got this particularly memorable point about composing a sentence: Once you write a sentence, it’s an orphan that you send out into the world and you can’t accompany it to help explain it, or to say “This is what I meant. You didn’t understand what I meant. But here’s what I meant.” And that’s the conversation I regularly have with students.

HLT: Has the amount of writing that practicing lawyers do changed over time?

Tobin: That’s an empirical question. I had a conversation with a judge I clerked for in the early 2000s, who wondered why opinions were getting so long: “Why can’t we write an Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. style short opinion?” Part of it is the common law tradition, in which we’re always accumulating more precedent, more statutory language, new sources, and more context for any dispute that arises. If you want to be thorough, you have to trace that evolution. So perhaps there’s more writing being done. On the other hand, lawyers are writing shorter pieces, maybe less formal contributions, than they did 30 or 40 years ago. What used to be a formal memo might now be a quick email with bullets outlining the most important points. So, I’m not sure that there is more or less writing being done, but the form of it and the speed with which it’s being requested may be changing.

HLT: Does the law still need to use Latin, which is a dead language, other than in the Vatican? Or does it just serve as a barrier to entry for non-Latin speakers?

Tobin: This is a fraught topic for me because I was fortunate to study Latin at the Vatican with the papal Latin secretary, the late Father Reginald Foster. So, I’ll have to fight the premise that Latin is bad as an absolute matter. Good writing often comes from a deep understanding of etymology, which comes in large part from a deep understanding of the Latin origins of English and of Latin rhetoric. We have learned a great deal, for example, from Cicero’s powerfully persuasive writing, including his legal arguments, or from the sharp clarity of Seneca. Of course, Latin is not the only influence on English language and law.

One of my favorite quotes on writing is from George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”: ”What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word and not the other way about.” One of the reasons writing takes time is that word choice matters. It’s good advice to remind students not to use $10 words when a 50-cent word will do. I don’t want my students going out of their way to use a polysyllabic word to show that they are smart. I know that they are smart. But I think the advice also runs the risk of proving too much, because English is a phenomenally rich language, influenced by Latin and other languages. And some words thought to be synonyms don’t mean exactly the same thing as other words. So sometimes, if you’re looking for a synonym, or you’re trying to be simple and direct, you can run the risk of losing nuance, and you run the risk of losing precision. And — maybe this is going too far — losing the chance for poetry in your writing, if you keep the vocabulary too narrow. And so, I guess I would have a plea for a middle ground, as Orwell suggests — choose the right word for the meaning you want.

But I also think Latin is used less today than it used to be in legal writing. Some Latin terms of art are, from our common law tradition, embedded in the law. Our students need to know what those words mean, so they can appreciate the meaning of a judicial opinion or the way a statute is constructed. But if you’re going to use Latin, you need to explain what it means. You don’t use it just as a bomb that you throw in the middle of a sentence to impress people or confuse readers.

So, should we be using Latin to gatekeep, to make it harder for people to understand? Absolutely not. But should we get rid of it entirely? Also no.

HLT: Do you have any legal writing tips for new students, upper-level students, or even practicing lawyers?

Tobin: My best advice for good writing is to read good writing. And so, even though they have many, many pages of required reading for class, I recommend to my students that they also keep reading narrative nonfiction, like articles in The New Yorker, because it’s like listening to music. If you have good rhythmic sentences in your head, if you hear the way someone puts together varied lengths of sentences and uses transitions well, and explains complicated concepts well, that sound will stay with you. I don’t know that I’ve convinced everybody to carry Ta-Nehisi Coates, Joan Didion, John McPhee, or Toni Morrison (not just her novels but essays) around with them, but I wish they would. I will give a shout-out to Chief Justice John Roberts ‘79 and Justice Elena Kagan ‘86, two of the best practitioners of legal writing.  Their sentence-level writing is superb. Bryan Garner’s “ Legal Writing in Plain English ,” Third Edition is a particularly helpful guide. And if you’re having trouble figuring out what’s good legal writing, ask your faculty what they recommend.

HLT: So, improve your writing by reading good writing. Any other tips?

Barton Tobin: Justice Kagan likes to say that good writing is hard. It takes a lot of time. It takes multiple drafts. I think that advice can be frustrating to hear when time is limited. But it’s profoundly true. Certainly, when you’re learning a new genre, your work is not going to come out perfectly the first time. But sadly, or perhaps encouragingly, as a practitioner of legal writing, you’re never going to be done practicing. You’re always going to be working to get better. And so, we do drafts and revisions, and we receive feedback, from peers and from instructors. On the peer editing point, sometimes my students will say to me, “Well, we’re not lawyers yet. So how can we possibly give good advice to our peers about their drafts?” I say, “But you are readers, and you know how to respond to something if it doesn’t make sense. And the fact that it doesn’t make sense, actually isn’t your problem. It’s the writer’s problem. It’s not that you’re confused, but that the writing is confusing.” And so, being able to give constructive feedback, and to feel justified in giving that feedback, I think helps you become a good reader of your own prose and a good editor. You’re ultimately your own editor. At the end of the day, you’re responsible for what you submit. Whatever feedback you get, you’re developing the skill of incorporating multiple suggestions and making judgments about which changes you’re going to accept.

Finally, as a lawyer, and particularly as a litigator, you are a professional writer. And there is pleasure to be taken in crafting prose that is powerful and persuasive. As busy as lawyers are, the benefits of taking care with your words is professionally and psychologically huge. And so, I hope people remember that truth.

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The Concepts of Law

Thanks to John Gerring, Brian Leiter, Saul Levmore, Simone Sepe, and Lawrence Solum for superb comments.

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Concepts are the building blocks of legal doctrine. All legal rules and standards, in fact, are formed by combining concepts in different ways. But despite their centrality, legal concepts are not well understood. There is no agreement as to what makes a legal concept useful or ineffective—worth keeping or in need of revision. Social scientists, however, have developed a set of criteria for successful concepts. Of these, the most important is measurability: the ability, at least in principle, to assess a concept with data. In this Essay, we apply the social scientific criteria to a number of concepts and conceptual relationships in American constitutional law. We show that this field includes both poor and effective concepts and conceptual links. We also explain how the examples of poor concepts could be improved.

I.  A Primer on Conceptualization and Measurement

A.    Concepts and Conceptualization

Concepts provide the mental architecture by which we understand the world and are ubiquitous in social science as well as law. Conceptualization involves the process of formulating a mental construct at a particular level of abstraction. 10 A large debate in the philosophy of cognitive science grapples with different views of concepts. 11 Some regard concepts as essentially nominal in character, meaning that they are about definitions of phenomena rather than the phenomena themselves. Some see concepts as marking mental representations of phenomena. 12 Others see concepts as ontological claims or “theories about the fundamental constitutive elements of a phenomenon.” 13

“Concept” itself is a tricky concept. For our purposes, concepts can be distinguished from other phenomena of interest to law such as words or rules. Law is composed of words or labels, but these are different from the concepts that are the building blocks of law. To see why, consider that a single label can refer to multiple concepts: a right means one thing when giving directions, but quite another when discussing the legal system. Even within the law, the concept of a right is different when thinking about an individual’s freedom from torture than when talking about Mother Nature’s right to remediation. 14 Conversely, a similar concept can be represented by different words.

Concepts are also distinct from rules . Rules provide decision procedures to categorize behavior as, for example, legal or illegal. A legal rule is composed of multiple concepts put together in a particular kind of relationship: if someone engages in murder , she shall be subject to a penalty of imprisonment . Each of these concepts might have subconcepts: murder , for example, is killing with malice aforethought or intent . The rule provides the criteria for decision, but relies on abstract ideas—concepts—with more or less intuitive appeal. This simple example demonstrates that law is built of concepts and subconcepts, structured together in particular ways.

Some concepts are developed through necessary, or necessary and sufficient, attributes. It is necessary that a mammal be an animal; it is necessary and sufficient that it be an animal that secretes milk to feed its young. Another way of approaching attributes is to list all the desirable ones, and perhaps to treat them additively, so that more of them will get one closer to the ideal of the particular concept. This is sometimes called a maximal strategy of conceptualization and is exemplified at the extreme by Max Weber’s concept of an ideal type, which may never be met in practice. 15 A third approach relies on the “family resemblance” of phenomena, so that even if no single attribute is necessary or sufficient, the presence of enough attributes will suffice to mark the presence of the concept. 16 Bearing live young, possessing fur, and secreting milk are common or typical attributes of mammals, even though the platypus, a mammal, does not have all of these features. Finally, and most relevant to our project here, some believe that concepts are always embedded in a broader theory, so that their essential features may not be observable at all, but instead are defined as part of the background theory. This is known as the “theory theory” of concepts. 17

Many legal tests are formulated as having necessary and sufficient attributes. If one has a duty to behave in a particular way, has breached this duty, and has caused damage to another, then one has, by definition, committed a tort. But some legal concepts are formulated as multipart tests in which factors are added and weighed, with an eye toward seeing if the ideal is met. In deciding if an attorney in a prevailing ERISA claim is to be awarded fees, for example, courts apply a five-factor test:

(1) the degree of culpability or bad faith attributable to the losing party; (2) the depth of the losing party’s pocket, i.e., his or her capacity to pay an award; (3) the extent (if at all) to which such an award would deter other persons acting under similar circumstances; (4) the benefit (if any) that the successful suit confers on plan participants or beneficiaries generally; and (5) the relative merit of the parties’ positions. 18

The implicit concept here is an ideal type of what might be called appropriate fee-shifting. None of the five elements is absolutely necessary, but if all five are plainly met, the ideal type will be achieved. The closer one gets to the ideal type, the more likely one is to get an award. The internal participant within the legal system, in this case a judge, will engage in the process of running through the attributes to see if they are met.

Legal concepts come in different levels of abstraction, often nested within one another. Private law is more encompassing than tort, which in turn encompasses negligent infliction of emotional distress. Unlike in social science, however, there is not much explicit legal work on concept formation, and few of the rich definitional debates that mark social scientific literatures on, say, democracy or even the rule of law. Our argument is that paying attention to legal concepts can improve the structure of the law.

B.    What Makes a Good Concept?

There are several different social scientific conceptualizations about what it is that makes a good concept. A common approach is a listing of attributes, such as parsimony, explanatory power, and distinction from other concepts. These lists vary from scholar to scholar, but we rely on a recent contribution from the prominent social scientist Professor John Gerring, who argues that a good social scientific concept can be evaluated on several dimensions. 19 It should have resonance, in that it should “make[ ] sense” to observers; it should have a stipulated domain over which it applies; it should be consistent, in the sense of conveying the same meaning in different contexts; it should be “fecund,” meaning that it has richness and depth; it should be differentiated from other neighboring concepts; it should have causal utility, meaning that it is useful; and it should in principle be measurable, that is, capable of being operationalized within social scientific frameworks. 20 Let us describe each of these in a bit more detail, with an application to law.

Resonance is a quality that is essentially linguistic in character, and can easily be applied to law. For example, we can ask whether a legal test is resonant with the relevant audience. Does the framework of examining tiers of scrutiny “make sense” to observers? Is proportionality an intuitive concept in terms of advancing ideas about justice? Is it faithful to established definitions? 21 We can also compare legal concepts for linguistic resonance: For example, in considering instances when a government diminishes an investment’s value, is “indirect expropriation” or “regulatory taking” a better concept? Resonance is essentially about labels and how well they communicate an idea to an audience.

Many legal concepts are clearly resonant. However, it is an interesting feature of some legal concepts that they are in fact distinct from the ordinary meaning attached to the same terms. Only in law does “intent” include reckless disregard as well as intending the outcome; “statutory rape” adds the adjective precisely because the conduct it condemns is consensual. There is thus some variation across legal concepts in terms of resonance.

Domain simply refers to the realm in which a concept applies, and is fairly clear when applied to law. 22 The domain of legal concepts is, in fact, the legal system, and is not meant to encompass anything outside it. Thus, specialized language within the law is deployed internally. Common-law marriage refers to the idea that the marriage is legal, even if not formally recorded.

Consistency requires that a concept carry the same meaning in different empirical contexts. 23 If the concept of felony murder is different in Louisiana and California, this would violate the requirement of consistency. Observe that the legal definitions in the two states might diverge, maybe even dramatically, but this does not mean that the concept would differ. But it is also the case that, for example, multipart tests may put pressure on conceptual consistency across contexts. To use the fee-shifting example described above, if an award were based primarily on the wealth of the losing party, it would imply a different purpose than if it were based on deterrence considerations. These might be seen as internally inconsistent applications of the test, ultimately based on different concepts.

Fecundity is defined by Gerring as referring to “coherence, depth, fruitfulness, illumination, informative-ness, insight, natural kinds, power, productivity, richness, or thickness.” 24 This collection of descriptors has to do with a concept’s ability to describe reality in a rich way, and in some sense to reveal a structure that might not be apparent without the concept. 25 It is a desirable feature of social science, though not so important in law in our view, because some legal concepts can be limited to very narrow technical applications. For example, in social science, in thinking about different types of political “regimes,” one might distinguish authoritarian regimes from democracies, or might alternately look at particular subtypes within each category: electoral authoritarians, totalitarians, military regimes, and absolute monarchies, 26 or presidential and parliamentary democracies. 27 An ana­logously fecund legal concept might be “rights,” which has generated many subtypes. But other legal concepts can be narrow and yet still effective within their specific domain: a lien or a stay, for example, reveals no deep structure.

Differentiation refers to the distinction between a concept and a neighboring concept. 28 Sometimes concepts are defined by their neighboring concepts. As Gerring notes, nation-states are defined in contrast with empires, political parties in contrast with interest groups. 29 It is thus the case that new concepts are best when they fit within existing concepts. When a new legal idea is created—sexual harassment, for example—it is helpful to mark how it differs from existing concepts. 30

Causal utility refers to the usefulness of a concept. 31 Obviously, this is domain specific. Professor Gary Goertz focuses on the utility of concepts for social scientific methods. 32 But in law we might ask how easy the concept is for courts to apply, and how effective it is in differentiating lawful from unlawful behavior.

The requirement that a concept be measurable is a frequent desideratum in social scientific accounts of concepts (in which it is sometimes called operationalizability). The idea here is not that there must be available data or indicators that meet the standard tests of social science. Instead, the point of measurability is that in principle there ought to be data that could be deployed to test theories that use the concept. 33 For legal tests, it may be prudent to consider whether measures can be developed in principle. This might help to ensure that the analyst is proposing a workable test that is capable of achieving its aims.

Consider an example of an internal legal doctrine, drawn again from the five-part test for attorney’s fees in the ERISA context. 34 Some of the elements are more amenable to empirical verification than others: the wealth of the losing party and the potential deterrent effect of an award are, in principle, quantifiable. The other elements—culpability, benefits, and relative merit—are less so. To successfully deploy this conceptual test, courts will thus have to aggregate, by an unknown weighting formula, five different elements that are fairly discrete, possibly incommensurable, and difficult to operationalize. To the extent that the elements are measurable, this exercise could be more precise, transparent, and ultimately legitimate. Our view is that measurability, even in principle, can bring precision and discipline to law.

C.    Relationships among Concepts

Many of the central questions in social science involve relationships among different concepts. Does democracy increase economic growth? Does race correlate with voting behavior? Do people behave rationally in their investment decisions? Are military alliances stable across time? Each of these questions features at least two different concepts, which might in theory take on different meanings and surely could be measured in many different ways. Each also features a relationship among concepts, whether causal or correlative.

Examining these relationships among concepts also requires operationalizing them. This means we must come up with tractable indicators or measures that can then be deployed into a research design. Indeed, some argue that this is the central criterion of a good social scientific concept. If a concept is not capable of being operationalized, then it is lacking a central characteristic, and even the presence of many other desirable features may not be able to save it. 35

Law, too, is centrally concerned with relationships among concepts. The variety of conceptual relationships in law is very large. The multipart tests mentioned above aggregate a variety of concepts into a single framework, which is fundamentally an additive approach to linking concepts. In contrast, the famous framework of Professor Wesley Hohfeld distinguished between conceptual correlates and conceptual opposites. 36 Correlative relationships are exemplified by the binary of right and duty, which co-occur so that if someone has a right, someone else has a duty. Opposites, on the other hand, are conceptually distinct. For example, someone with no duty has a privilege to do something or not; privilege and duty are opposites in Hohfeld’s framework. 37 In other cases, concepts are nested within one another in fields: tort includes intentional infliction of emotional distress. Still other concepts can cut across fields: the concept of intent is used in multiple fields of law, sometimes in different ways. Many further types of semantic relationships are conceivable as well.

Rather than try to exhaustively categorize all possible relationships, we are most concerned here with a particular kind of connection among legal concepts: that of a causal character. Causal relationships are very common in legal concepts. At the most basic level, law often seeks to advance particular interests. Some of these interests, such as efficiency, justice, or fairness, are external to the law itself. Others may themselves be defined by the law, and so can be characterized as internal concepts. Either way, there is an assumption that legal rules have some causal efficacy in advancing interests. This is what is sometimes called an instrumental view of law. 38 While it is not the only view on offer, we adopt it for present purposes. We need not offer an absolute defense of the instrumental view, even if we are partial to it; the reader need accept only that it is a common view.

Causation is a good example of a concept that is used in both law and social science, in slightly different ways. Causation in social science is essentially conceived of in probabilistic terms. 39 If we say that X causes Y , we are saying that a change in the value of X will likely be associated with a change in the value of Y , holding all else constant. The tools of social science, and the rules of inference, are designed to help identify such relationships. In contrast, legal causation is more normative, focusing on the kinds of responsibility for harms that warrant liability and the kinds that do not. 40

Other examples of causal legal relationships abound. When we ask if a regulation constitutes a taking of property (or an indirect expropriation, to use the international law term), we want to know whether a change in the level of regulation would lead to a change in one’s ability to use the property to the point that the owner should receive compensation. 41 When we ask whether a policy has a discriminatory impact on a group under the Fair Housing Act 42 or Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 43 we need to identify baseline levels of demographic concentration, and then ask whether a different policy would lead to a different level of treatment for the group. 44 We also want to compare alternative policies. Is it the case that once a particular level of impact is reached, one can stop the inquiry? Or is it a matter of cost-benefit analysis, such that increases in the impact may be outweighed by benefits on the other side? If so, does the disparate impact increase in a linear way with increments of the policy? These types of questions are rarely considered by lawyers or judges, who use causal language in a more heuristic way.

As these examples suggest, recognizing that legal concepts often involve relationships implies that we ought to favor concepts whose connections can in fact be identified and established. This is because such concepts can in principle be applied in consistent and precise ways across cases. While we know that not every concept can be captured by a real-world indicator or variable, we still think it valuable for lawyers and judges to focus on relationships for which the basic logic of X and Y holds.

Of course, the fact that not every relationship between concepts can be measured poses challenges for certain analyses. For instance, legal philosophers have wrestled with the idea of incommensurability, “the absence of a scale or metric.” 45 When values are not capable of being arrayed on a single scale, we think of them as incommensurable. Thinking about relationships that in principle can be ordered and tested on the same scale will, ceteris paribus, make the law more tractable. Similarly, the idea of outright necessity is subtly different from the more feasible notions of causation and correlation. Proving that only X can achieve Y is much more difficult—in fact, impossible in many contexts—than showing that X is one of the factors that drive Y .

II.  Conceptualizing Constitutional Law

To reiterate the discussion to this point: Social scientists have developed reasonably determinate criteria for distinguishing between effective and ineffective concepts, and between conceptual relationships that can and cannot be demonstrated. In brief, the hallmarks of effective concepts are resonance, domain specificity, consistency, fecundity, differentiation from other concepts, causal utility, and, above all, measurability. Similarly, conceptual relationships involving correlation or causality are more easily established than ones involving necessity or the weighing of incommensurable quantities.

How well does law perform under these criteria? Are its concepts and conceptual relationships satisfactory or in need of improvement? These questions are far too broad to be answered fully here, but we begin to address them using a series of examples from American constitutional law. These examples include both poor concepts and relationships (for which we suggest improvement) and effective ones (for which we explain why they are useful). Constitutional law also strikes us as an unusually fertile field to plow for illustrations. It is a subject that brims with concepts and complex linkages among them. These concepts and linkages are largely (though not entirely) judicially created, meaning that they can be revised by the courts as well. And, not unimportantly for a project that potentially implicates law’s entire empire, constitutional law is a discrete domain with which we are relatively familiar.

A.    Poor Concepts

Before labeling any concept as poor, we must note a number of caveats. First, our tags are based not on a rigorous examination of all constitutional concepts (a daunting task to say the least), but rather on an impressionistic survey of several high-profile areas. In other words, we do not claim to have identified the worst (or best) concepts, but only a few concepts that mostly fail (or satisfy) the social scientific criteria for conceptualization. Second, our treatment of each concept is necessarily brief. We hit what we see as the essential points, but we cannot grapple here with each concept’s full complexity. And third, though our mode is diagnostic, criticizing certain concepts and praising others, our ultimate aim is prescriptive. That is, we are interested in contemplating how constitutional law might look if its concepts were more effective—and in finding ways to push the doctrine in that direction.

Having disposed of these preliminaries, corruption is our first example of a concept that we regard as unhelpful. The prevention of corruption is the only justification the Supreme Court has recognized for burdening First Amendment rights by restricting the financing of political campaigns. 46 Corruption is also unquestionably a resonant and fecund concept, in that it is intuitively undesirable to most observers and conveys a rich array of negative meanings. This rich array, though, is part of the problem. Precisely because corruption can mean many different things, the term can be—and has been—defined in many different ways. 47 The Court, in particular, has toggled back and forth between three conceptions: a narrower version limited to explicit quid pro quos, or overt exchanges of money for official governmental acts; 48 a broader version covering funders’ access to and influence over officeholders; 49 and a still more expansive version extending to the distortion of electoral outcomes due to corporate spending. 50

In terms of the social scientific criteria, these shifting notions mean that corruption lacks domain specificity, consistency, and differentiation from other concepts. Domain specificity is missing because the narrower version applies to only the restriction of campaign contributions, while the two broader versions justify the limitation of campaign expenditures as well. 51 Consistency is absent for the obvious reason that the Court has adopted three in consistent definitions of corruption in the span of just a single generation. And depending on how it is construed, corruption bleeds into bribery (whose trademark is the quid pro quo exchange), skewed representation (responsive to funders rather than voters), or inequality (in electoral influence). 52

One might respond that most of these difficulties would be avoided if the Court could only settle on a single notion of corruption. But there is no easy way in which the Court could do so because, as several scholars have pointed out, corruption is a derivative concept that becomes intelligible only through an antecedent theory of purity for the entity at issue. 53 With respect to legislators, for example, one can say they are corrupt only if one first has an account of how they should behave when they are pure. One thus needs a model of representation before one can arrive at a definition of legislative corruption—a definition that would correspond to deviation from this model. Of course, the Court could choose to embrace a particular representational approach, but this is hardly a straightforward matter, and it is one in which the Court has evinced no interest to date.

Moreover, even if the Court somehow managed to stick to a single notion of corruption, it would run into further issues of measurability and causal utility. These issues stem from the covert nature of most corrupt activities. When politicians trade votes for money, they do so in secret. When officeholders merely offer access or influence to their funders, they again do so as furtively as possible. Precisely for these reasons, social scientists have rarely been able to quantify corruption itself, resorting instead to rough proxies such as people’s trust in government 54 and the volume of public officials convicted of bribery. 55 Unsurprisingly, given the crudity of these metrics, no significant relationships have been found between campaign finance regulation and corruption. 56 Greater regulation seems neither to increase people’s faith in their rulers nor to reduce the number of officials taken on perp walks.

Thanks to its poor performance on almost every criterion, we consider corruption to be an unsalvageable concept. It has not been, nor can it be, properly defined or measured. If it were abandoned, though, what would take its place in the campaign finance case law? We see two options. Less controversially, corruption could be swapped for one of the concepts into which it blurs, such as bribery. More provocatively (because further doctrinally afield), campaign finance regulation could be justified based on its promotion of distinct values such as electoral competitiveness, voter participation, or congruence with the median voter’s preferences. 57 This is not the place to defend these values, though offhand all seem more tractable than corruption. Our point, rather, is that when a particular concept is unworkable, it is often possible to replace it with a more suitable alternative.

We turn next to our second example of a flawed constitutional concept: political powerlessness , which is one of the four indicia of suspect class status under equal protection law. 58 Like corruption, powerlessness is a self-evidently resonant and fecund concept. To say that a group is powerless is to say something important about it, to convey a great deal of information about the group’s position, organization, and capability. Also, as with corruption, the amount of information conveyed is a bug, not a feature. The many inferences supported by powerlessness give rise to many definitions of the term by the Court, including a group’s small numerical size, inability to vote, lack of descriptive representation, low socioeconomic status, and failure to win the passage of protective legislation. 59

And again as with corruption, these multiple notions of powerlessness sap the concept of consistency and differentiation from other concepts. The inconsistency is obvious; the notions of powerlessness are not just multiple, but also irreconcilable. 60 Depending on how it is defined, powerlessness also becomes difficult to distinguish from concepts such as disenfranchisement, underrepresentation, and even poverty. And while the different conceptions of powerlessness do not directly undermine its domain specificity, this criterion is not satisfied either, due to the uncertainty over how powerlessness relates to the other indicia of suspect class status. It is unclear whether powerlessness is a necessary, sufficient, or merely conducive condition for a class to be deemed suspect. 61

However, unlike with corruption, a particular definition of powerlessness may be theoretically compelled—and is certainly not theoretically precluded. The powerlessness factor has its roots in United States v Carolene Products Co ’s 62 account of “those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities.” 63 “Those political processes,” in turn, refer to pluralism: the idea that society is divided into countless overlapping groups, from whose shifting coalitions public policy emerges. 64 And pluralism implies a specific notion of group power: one that is continuous rather than binary, spans all issues, focuses on policy enactment, and controls for group size and type. 65 Thus, powerlessness not only can, but arguably must, be conceived of in a certain way if it is to remain true to its pluralist pedigree.

Furthermore, if powerlessness is so understood, it becomes possible to measure and apply it. Social scientists have compiled extensive data on both the policy preferences of different groups and whether these preferences are realized in enacted law. 66 Combining this information, a group’s odds of getting its preferred policies passed can be determined, adjusted for the group’s size, and then compared to the odds of other groups. 67 This method yields the conclusions that blacks and women (both already suspect classes) are relatively powerless compared to whites and men. 68 Interestingly, it also indicates that the poor (not currently a suspect class) have far less clout than the middle class and the wealthy. 69

Because powerlessness can be—even though it has not been—defined and measured properly, we come to a different verdict for it than for corruption. That is, we recommend discarding the Court’s various notions of it and replacing them with the pluralist conception outlined above. Considering corruption and powerlessness in tandem also allows us to hazard a guess as to why the Court sometimes adopts faulty concepts. In both of these (potentially unrepresentative) cases, the Court borrowed complex ideas from democratic theory without fully grasping the ideas’ internal logic. At best (as with powerlessness), this approach leads to the circulation of numerous definitions of the concept, one of which is eventually found to be theoretically and practically defensible. At worst (as with corruption), the approach causes multiple definitions to be bandied about, none of which is theoretically legitimate or capable of being operationalized. Plainly, this is a far cry from textbook concept formation.

B.    Effective Concepts

We doubt that the Court ever complies perfectly with any social scientific textbook. But the Court does, on occasion, recognize constitutional concepts that are significantly more effective than the ones analyzed to this point. As a first example of a successful concept, take partisan symmetry , which five justices tentatively endorsed in a recent case as a potential foundation for a test for partisan gerrymandering. 70 Partisan symmetry “requires that the electoral system treat similarly-situated parties equally,” so that they are able to convert their popular support into legislative representation with approximately equal ease. 71 The Court cautiously backed symmetry only after struggling for decades with—and ultimately rejecting—a host of other possible linchpins for a gerrymandering test: seat-vote proportionality (inconsistent with single-member districts), predominant partisan intent (too difficult to discern), district noncompactness (not itself a meaningful value), and so on. 72

Partisan symmetry performs suitably well along all of the relevant dimensions. It is resonant and fecund because it captures the core harm of gerrymandering: a district plan that enables one party to translate its votes into seats more efficiently than its rival. 73 It is limited to the domain of electoral systems. It is defined identically in both the case law and the academic literature. 74 It is distinct from the other concepts the Court has considered in this area—including proportionality, which is a property that symmetric plans may, but need not, exhibit. 75 It is measurable using easily obtained electoral data and well-established statistical techniques. 76 And it is useful in that it conveys in a single figure the direction and extent of a plan’s partisan skew.

However, we do not mean to claim that partisan symmetry is a flawless concept. It does not take into account odd district shape or partisan motivation, both aspects of gerrymandering as the practice is commonly understood. Its calculation requires fairly strong assumptions about uncontested races and shifts in the statewide vote. 77 Two different symmetry metrics exist, which usually but not always point in the same direction. 78 And to form a workable test for gerrymandering, symmetry must be combined with other prongs, thus somewhat diminishing its utility. Somewhat , though, is the key word here. Symmetry is not a perfect concept; no concept is. But symmetry can be defined, measured, and applied coherently, which is the most the law can ask of a concept.

Our second example of an effective concept, racial polarization in voting , has had a doctrinal history similar to that of partisan symmetry. Between the early 1970s and the mid-1980s, the Court struggled to identify the exact problem with racial vote dilution (the reduction of minorities’ electoral influence through means other than burdening the franchise). 79 Unable to crystallize the issue, the Court instead laid out a dozen factors that were meant to be analyzed in unison to determine liability. 80 This unwieldy doctrinal structure finally collapsed in 1986, when the Court held that plaintiffs had to prove racial polarization in order to prevail. 81 The Court also carefully defined polarization as “the situation where different races . . . vote in blocs for different candidates.” 82

Like partisan symmetry, racial polarization in voting complies reasonably well with all of the social scientific criteria for conceptualization. It is resonant and fecund because it reflects the reality that racial vote dilution is possible only under polarized electoral conditions. If polarization does not exist, then neither can a minority group prefer a distinct candidate, nor can the majority thwart a minority-preferred candidate’s election. 83 It is limited to the field of vote dilution, not even extending to the adjacent area of vote denial. 84 It is understood in the same way by both judges and scholars. 85 It is different from other important vote dilution concepts like a minority group’s geographic compactness and elected officials’ responsiveness to the group’s concerns. 86 It is measurable by applying ecological regression techniques to election results and demographic data. 87 And it is useful because it is both the mechanism that drives vote dilution and a metric reducible to a single number.

But also like partisan symmetry, racial polarization in voting has its warts too. Not all commentators agree that it is troublesome when it is caused by forces other than racial prejudice, such as differences in partisanship or socioeconomic status. 88 Nor is there consensus that polarization in voting is the quantity of interest, as some scholars emphasize polarization in policy preferences instead. 89 Furthermore, courts have never resolved how extreme polarization must be to establish liability. And almost from the day polarization became a requirement, it has been clear that its measurement is complicated by residential integration, the presence of more than two racial groups, and the inevitable endogeneity of election results (above all, to the particular candidates competing). 90 All of these shortcomings, though, strike us as fixable rather than fatal. This also has been the judgment of the judiciary, which has productively analyzed polarization in hundreds of cases since 1986. 91

As before, we are wary of generalizing based on only a pair of cases. But considered together, partisan symmetry and racial polarization in voting suggest that the Court does better when it turns for concepts to empirical political science than to high democratic theory. Before they ever appeared in the Court’s case law, symmetry and polarization had been precisely defined and then measured using large volumes of data as well as methods that steadily improved over time. 92 These properties meant that when the ideas came to the Court’s attention, they were ready for prime time. They were not lofty abstractions that had yet to be made concrete, but rather practical concepts whose scope and calculation were already established. Our view is that this approach—adopting concepts previously formulated and refined by empirical social scientists—is generally advisable. It lets the Court benefit from the efforts of other disciplines, while avoiding reliance on concepts articulated at too high a level of generality to be legally useful.

C.    Poor Relationships

We turn next to examples of poor and effective conceptual relationships in constitutional law. We also reiterate our earlier caveats: that the cases we highlight are not necessarily representative, that our discussion of each case is relatively brief, and that we mean for our descriptive analysis to have normative implications for the structure of constitutional doctrine.

That said, the narrow tailoring requirement of strict scrutiny is our first example of an unhelpful constitutional relationship. As a formal matter, this requirement states that, to survive review, a challenged policy must be “necessary” 93 or “the least restrictive means” 94 for furthering a compelling governmental interest. In practice, the requirement is implemented sometimes in this way and sometimes by balancing the harm inflicted by a policy against the degree to which it advances a compelling interest—with a heavy thumb on the harm’s side of the scale. 95 Narrow tailoring is ubiquitous in constitutional law, applying to (among other areas) explicit racial classifications, 96 policies that burden rights recognized as fundamental under the Due Process Clause, 97 and measures that regulate speech on the basis of its content. 98

The fundamental problem with narrow tailoring is that there is no reliable way to tell whether a policy is actually necessary or the least restrictive means for promoting a given interest. Social scientific techniques are very good at determining whether a means is related (that is, correlated) to an end. They are also reasonably adept at assessing causation, though this is a more difficult issue. Other variables that might be linked to the end can be controlled for, and all kinds of quasi-experimental approaches can be employed. 99 But social scientific techniques are largely incapable of demonstrating necessity. A mere correlation does not even establish causation, let alone that a policy is the least restrictive means for furthering an interest. Even when causation is shown, it always remains possible that a different policy would advance the interest at least as well. Not every conceivable control can be included in a model, and the universe of policy alternatives is near infinite as well. In short, the gold standard of social science is proving that X causes Y —but this proof cannot guarantee that some other variable does not drive Y to an even greater extent. 100

A somewhat different critique applies to the balancing that courts sometimes carry out instead of means-end analysis. Here, the trouble is that the quantities being compared—the harm inflicted by a policy, either by burdening certain rights or by classifying groups in certain ways, and the policy’s promotion of a compelling governmental interest—are incommensurable, in the sense we outlined earlier. Social science has little difficulty with the comparison of quantities that are measured using the same scale. Familiar techniques such as factor analysis also enable quantities measured using different scales to be collapsed into a single composite variable. 101 But there is little that social science can do when the relevant quantities are measured differently, cannot be collapsed, and yet must be weighed against each other. This kind of inquiry, as Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote, is akin to “judging whether a particular line is longer than a particular rock is heavy.” 102 Instinct and intuition may assist in answering the question, but more rigorous methods are unavailing.

These faults of narrow tailoring seem irremediable to us. It is simply infeasible to have to determine a policy’s necessity or whether its harms are offset by its incommensurable benefits. Fortunately, an obvious alternative exists: the means-end analysis that courts conduct when they engage in intermediate scrutiny. In these cases, courts ask whether a policy is “substantially related” to the achievement of an important governmental objective. 103 A substantial relationship means either a substantial correlation or, perhaps, a causal connection. 104 Either way, the issue is squarely in the wheelhouse of social science, whose forte is assessing correlation and causation. We therefore recommend exporting this aspect of intermediate scrutiny to the strict scrutiny context—perhaps with an additional twist or two to keep the latter more rigorous than the former. For instance, a strong rather than merely substantial relationship could be required, or a large impact on the relevant governmental goal.

Our second example of a poor constitutional relationship is the undue burden test that applies to regulations of abortion, voting, and (when enacted by states) interstate commerce. 105 In all of these areas, a law is invalid if it imposes an undue burden on the value at issue: the right to an abortion, 106 the right to vote, 107 or the free flow of interstate commerce. 108 An initial problem with this test is the ambiguity of its formulation. It is unclear whether “undue” contemplates a link between a challenged policy and a governmental interest and, if so, what sort of link it requires. Precisely because of this ambiguity, no consistent definition exists of an undue burden. Instead, courts use different versions of the test, even within the same domain, of varying manageability.

For example, an undue burden is sometimes treated as synonymous with a significant burden. “A finding of an undue burden is a shorthand for the conclusion that a state regulation . . . plac[es] a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion,” declared the joint opinion in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v Casey . 109 If an undue burden is understood in this way, we have no quarrel with it. The magnitude of a burden is measurable, at least in principle, and does not involve a policy’s connection with a governmental interest. It is a concept rather than a conceptual relationship.

On the other hand, an undue burden is sometimes construed as one that is unnecessary to achieve a legitimate governmental objective. The Casey joint opinion articulated the test in these terms as well: “Unnecessary health regulations that . . . present[ ] a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion impose an undue burden on the right.” 110 So conceived, an undue burden falls victim to our earlier criticism of narrow tailoring. That is, there is no good way to tell whether a policy is the least restrictive means for accomplishing a given goal, meaning that there is also no good way to tell whether the burden imposed by the policy is undue.

On still other occasions, the undue burden test devolves into judicial balancing, with the severity of a policy’s burden weighed against the degree to which the policy promotes governmental interests. The burden is then deemed undue if it fails this cost-benefit analysis. As the Court has stated in the Dormant Commerce Clause context, where it “has candidly undertaken a balancing approach in resolving these issues,” a policy “will be upheld unless the burden imposed on such commerce is [ ] excessive in relation to the putative local benefits.” 111 Plainly, this formulation is also vulnerable to our challenge to narrow tailoring. Burdens on abortion, voting, or interstate commerce are no more commensurable with gains in governmental interests than are other types of rights burdens or the harms of racial classifications. Balancing under narrow tailoring is indistinguishable from balancing under an undue burden test.

Because several notions of an undue burden percolate in the case law, doctrinal progress is possible here without wholesale rejection of the status quo. 112 Instead, courts need discard only the versions that entail least-restrictive-means or balancing analyses, leaving them with the approach that equates an undue with a significant burden. Judicial scrutiny could then vary based on a burden’s magnitude, with a severe burden leading to more stringent review and a lighter imposition prompting a more relaxed appraisal. This is already the method that courts most commonly use in the voting context, 113 and it could be extended to the abortion and Dormant Commerce Clause domains—preferably with our amendment to strict scrutiny stripping it of its narrow tailoring prong.

D.    Effective Relationships

In still other areas, no doctrinal revisions seem necessary because the existing conceptual relationships work well enough already. As a first example of effective relationships, take the traceability and redressability elements of standing. After appearing intermittently in the case law for years, these elements were constitutionalized in Lujan v Defenders of Wildlife . 114 A plaintiff’s injury must be “fairly traceable to the challenged action of the defendant,” meaning that “there must be a causal connection between the injury and the conduct complained of.” 115 Additionally, “it must be likely, as opposed to merely speculative, that the injury will be redressed by a favorable decision.” 116

Traceability and redressability are often analyzed together; in fact, “[m]ost cases view redressability as an essentially automatic corollary of [traceability].” 117 Both relationships are also highly tractable because they explicitly require causation, which is precisely the kind of link that social science is able to demonstrate. The essential traceability issue is whether the defendant’s challenged action caused the plaintiff’s harm. Similarly, the crux of redressability is whether the plaintiff’s desired remedy will cause her harm to be cured. These are pure matters of causation, undiluted by any hint of means-end necessity or incommensurable balancing.

Given that standing doctrine is often deemed “[e]xtremely fuzzy and highly manipulable,” 118 some readers may be surprised by our favorable account. We do not mean to suggest that the causal questions posed by the doctrine—what impact certain measures have had or will have on a plaintiff—are easy to answer. The data needed to address these issues is often unavailable (or uncited), forcing courts to rely on their qualitative judgment. Even when rigorous evidence exists, there is no guarantee that courts will take it into account. Our claim, then, is only that the traceability and redressability elements are appealing in principle because of their emphasis on causation. In practice, the necessary causal inquiries may be difficult to conduct, or overlooked even when they are feasible.

Fewer of these caveats are required for our second example of a successful constitutional relationship: the Necessary and Proper Clause , which authorizes Congress to enact any laws that are “necessary and proper for carrying into Execution” its enumerated powers. 119 At first glance, the Clause appears to exemplify a poor relationship because it stipulates that a law must be “necessary” to be permissible. But the Court has held that “‘necessary’ does not mean necessary” in this context. 120 Instead, it means “convenient, or useful or conducive to the authority’s beneficial exercise.” 121 Under this standard, a law will be upheld if it “constitutes a means that is rationally related to the implementation of a constitutionally enumerated power.” 122

So construed, the Necessary and Proper Clause essentially demands that a statute be correlated with the promotion of a textually specified goal. That is, the statute must make the goal’s achievement at least somewhat more likely, or must lead to at least a somewhat higher level of the goal. Needless to say, it is relatively straightforward to identify a correlational link between a means and an end. Doing so, in fact, is one of the simpler tasks that can be asked of social science. This is why we approve of the sort of relationship that must be demonstrated under the Clause; it is the sort whose existence can be proven or rebutted with little room for debate.

However, we note that the Court has recently begun to revive the “Proper” in “Necessary and Proper”—and to infuse into it requirements other than a means-end correlation. In National Federation of Independent Business v Sebelius , 123 in particular, the Court held that the Clause authorizes neither the exercise of “great” (as opposed to “incidental”) powers, nor the passage of “laws that undermine the structure of government established by the Constitution.” 124 We regard these developments as unfortunate. Both the significance of a power and a law’s consistency with our constitutional structure are normative matters that are poorly suited to empirical examination. The insertion of these issues into the doctrine has blurred what was previously an admirably clear relational picture.

Our inquiry into the social scientific disciplines of conceptualization and measurement suggests that they may have rich payoffs for lawyers. (To use a recurring term from our discussion, they are fecund.) Examining legal doctrines through the lens of conceptualization, we argue, allows us to evaluate what are good and bad concepts and relationships in law. We draw on one set of social science criteria for good concepts, which includes that they are resonant, have a stipulated domain, can be applied consistently, are fecund, are distinct from neighboring concepts, are useful, and can in principle be measured. Similarly, good relationships are those that involve causation or correlation, but not necessity or the weighing of incommensurable values.

We emphasize the criterion of potential measurability, which is another way of saying that courts should recognize concepts and relationships that are in principle verifiable. While in many cases this would be difficult to achieve in practice, the discipline of thinking in terms of whether X and Y can be reliably assessed, and whether X is linked to Y , would, we suspect, lead courts to greater consistency and thus predictability. In particular, our analysis suggests that courts should shy away from complex multipart tests that involve the ad hoc balancing of incommensurables. 125 Just as social scientists require dependable measures across cases, legal doctrines that are measurable can be subjected to productive scrutiny, potentially leading to more coherent application of the law. In short, important rule-of-law values can be advanced through an approach to law that draws on what some might see as an unlikely source—social scientific thinking.

• 10 See Goertz, Social Science Concepts at 28–30 (cited in note 5); Gerring, Social Science Methodology at 112–13 (cited in note 5).
• 11 The debate goes back to Aristotle. See Gerring, Social Science Methodology at 114–15 (cited in note 5). See also Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence, Concepts (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, May 17, 2011), online at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2012/entries/concepts (visited Dec 28, 2016) (Perma archive unavailable).
• 12 See Margolis and Laurence, Concepts (cited in note 11).
• 13 Goertz, Social Science Concepts at 5 (cited in note 5).
• 14 See Ecuador Const Art 71, translation archived at http://perma.cc/DKJ5-E3K8 (“Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.”).
• 15 See Gerring, Social Science Methodology at 136–37 (cited in note 5), citing Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences 90 (Free Press 1949) (Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, eds and trans).
• 16 Goertz, Social Science Concepts at 36 (cited in note 5).
• 17 Margolis and Laurence, Concepts (cited in note 11).
• 18 Cottrill v Sparrow, Johnson & Ursillo, Inc , 100 F3d 220, 225 (1st Cir 1996).
• 19 See Gerring, Social Science Methodology at 117–19 (cited in note 5). See also John Gerring, What Makes a Concept Good? A Criterial Framework for Understanding Concept Formation in the Social Sciences , 31 Polity 357, 367 (1999) (offering a slightly different set of criteria).
• 20 See Gerring, Social Science Methodology at 117 (cited in note 5) (listing Gerring’s criteria of conceptualization).
• 21 See id at 117–19.
• 22 See id at 119–21.
• 23 See id at 121–24.
• 24 Gerring, Social Science Methodology at 124 (cited in note 5).
• 25 See id at 124–26.
• 26 See Barbara Geddes, Paradigms and Sand Castles: Theory Building and Research Design in Comparative Politics 50–53 (Michigan 2003).
• 27 See José Antonio Cheibub, Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and Democracy 26–48 (Cambridge 2007).
• 28 See Gerring, Social Science Methodology at 127–30 (cited in note 5).
• 29 See id at 127.
• 30 See Catharine A. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination 57–59 (Yale 1979) (discussing whether sexual harassment fits neatly into the sex discrimination category).
• 31 See Gerring, Social Science Methodology at 130–31 (cited in note 5).
• 32 See Goertz, Social Science Concepts at 4 (cited in note 5) (noting that the key features are relevance “for hypotheses, explanations, and causal mechanisms”).
• 33 See Gerring, Social Science Methodology at 156–57 (cited in note 5).
• 34 See Cottrill , 100 F3d at 225.
• 35 See Goertz, Social Science Concepts at 6 (cited in note 5).
• 36 See Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning , 26 Yale L J 710, 710 (1917).
• 37 See id at 710, 716–17.
• 38 See Alon Harel, Why Law Matters 46 (Oxford 2014).
• 39 See Ellery Eells, Probabilistic Causality 34–35 (Cambridge 1991).
• 40 But see Antony Honoré, Causation in the Law (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Nov 17, 2010), online at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/causation-law (visited Jan 23, 2017) (Perma archive unavailable) (noting the complexity of the relationship between causing harm and legal responsibility).
• 41 See Lucas v South Carolina Coastal Council , 505 US 1003, 1027 (1992) (discussing under what circumstances a state “may resist compensation” for “regulation that deprives land of all economically beneficial use”).
• 42 Pub L No 90-284, 82 Stat 81 (1968), codified as amended at 42 USC § 3601 et seq.
• 43 Pub L No 88-352, 78 Stat 252, codified as amended at 42 USC § 2000d et seq.
• 44 See Metropolitan Housing Development Corp v Village of Arlington Heights , 558 F2d 1283, 1290–91 (7th Cir 1977).
• 45 Matthew Adler, Law and Incommensurability: Introduction , 146 U Pa L Rev 1169, 1170 (1998).
• 46 See McCutcheon v Federal Election Commission , 134 S Ct 1434, 1450 (2014) (Roberts) (plurality).
• 47 See, for example, Thomas F. Burke, The Concept of Corruption in Campaign Finance Law , 14 Const Commen 127, 128–35 (1997) (discussing three academic and three judicial definitions of corruption); Yasmin Dawood, Classifying Corruption , 9 Duke J Const L & Pub Pol 103, 106–32 (2014) (going through ten separate notions of corruption).
• 48 See, for example, McCutcheon , 134 S Ct at 1450 (Roberts) (plurality) (“Congress may target only a specific type of corruption[,] . . . large contributions that are given to secure a political quid pro quo from current and potential office holders.”) (quotation marks and brackets omitted).
• 49 See, for example, McConnell v Federal Election Commission , 540 US 93, 150 (2003) (“Congress’ legitimate interest extends beyond preventing simple cash-for-votes corruption to curbing undue influence on an officeholder’s judgment, and the appearance of such influence.”) (quotation marks omitted).
• 50 See, for example, Austin v Michigan State Chamber of Commerce , 494 US 652, 660 (1990) (recognizing “a different type of corruption in the political arena: the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form”).
• 51 Compare Citizens United v Federal Election Commission , 558 US 310, 361 (2010), with McConnell , 540 US at 203, and Austin , 494 US at 660.
• 52 As should be clear from this discussion, our critique is not that the Court has used inconsistent words to describe the same underlying concept . Rather, each of the Court’s definitions of corruption corresponds to an entirely different notion of what it means for elected officials to be corrupt.
• 53 See, for example, Burke, 14 Const Commen at 128 (cited in note 47) (“When corruption is proclaimed in political life it presumes some ideal state.”); Deborah Hellman, Defining Corruption and Constitutionalizing Democracy , 111 Mich L Rev 1385, 1389 (2013) (“[C]orruption is a derivative concept, meaning it depends on a theory of the institution or official involved.”).
• 54 See, for example, Nathaniel Persily and Kelli Lammie, Perceptions of Corruption and Campaign Finance: When Public Opinion Determines Constitutional Law , 153 U Pa L Rev 119, 145–48 (2004). See also Corruption Perceptions Index 2015 (Transparency International, Feb 1, 2016), archived at http://perma.cc/C4XQ-6CE3.
• 55 See, for example, Adriana Cordis and Jeff Milyo, Do State Campaign Finance Reforms Reduce Public Corruption? *11–16 (unpublished manuscript, Jan 2013), archived at http://perma.cc/9KRP-FC9C.
• 56 See id at *21–28; Persily and Lammie, 153 U Pa L Rev at 148–49 (cited in note 54).
• 57 As to the last of these values, see generally Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos, Aligning Campaign Finance Law , 101 Va L Rev 1425 (2015).
• 58 Political powerlessness was first recognized as a factor in San Antonio Independent School District v Rodriguez , 411 US 1, 28 (1973).
• 59 See Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos, Political Powerlessness , 90 NYU L Rev 1527, 1537–42 (2015) (discussing the various judicial versions of powerlessness).
• 60 See id at 1540 (“The crucial point about these definitions is that they are entirely inconsistent with one another.”). Accordingly, these are not just different ways of expressing the same underlying idea; rather, they are divergent accounts of what it means to be powerless in the first place. See note 52.
• 61 See, for example, Varnum v Brien , 763 NW2d 862, 888 (Iowa 2009) (pointing out “the flexible manner in which the Supreme Court has applied the four factors [relevant to suspect class status]”).
• 62 304 US 144 (1938).
• 63 Id at 152 n 4.
• 64 See Bruce A. Ackerman, Beyond Carolene Products, 98 Harv L Rev 713, 719 (1985) (“[G]enerations of American political scientists have filled in the picture of pluralist democracy presupposed by Carolene ’s distinctive argument for minority rights.”).
• 65 See Stephanopoulos, 90 NYU L Rev at 1549–54 (cited in note 59) (making this argument at length).
• 66 See, for example, Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America 57–66 (Princeton 2012).
• 67 See, for example, id at 77–87.
• 68 See Stephanopoulos, 90 NYU L Rev at 1583–84, 1590–92 (cited in note 59).
• 69 See, for example, Gilens, Affluence and Influence at 80–81 (cited in note 66); Patrick Flavin, Income Inequality and Policy Representation in the American States , 40 Am Polit Rsrch 29, 40–44 (2012).
• 70 See League of United Latin American Citizens v Perry , 548 US 399, 420 (2006) (Kennedy) (plurality) (“LULAC”); id at 466 (Stevens concurring in part and dissenting in part); id at 483 (Souter concurring in part and dissenting in part); id at 492 (Breyer concurring in part and dissenting in part).
• 71 Id at 466 (Stevens concurring in part and dissenting in part).
• 72 See Vieth v Jubelirer , 541 US 267, 285–86 (2004) (Scalia) (plurality).
• 73 See id at 271 n 1 (Scalia) (plurality) (noting that gerrymandering has been defined as “giv[ing] one political party an unfair advantage by diluting the opposition’s voting strength”).
• 74 Compare LULAC , 548 US at 466 (Stevens concurring in part and dissenting in part), with Bernard Grofman and Gary King, The Future of Partisan Symmetry as a Judicial Test for Partisan Gerrymandering after LULAC v. Perry, 6 Election L J 2, 6 (2007).
• 75 See Grofman and King, 6 Election L J at 8 (cited in note 74) (“Measuring symmetry . . . does not require ‘proportional representation’ (where each party receives the same proportion of seats as it receives in votes).”).
• 76 See id at 10 (noting that symmetry is measured using “highly mature statistical methods [that] rely on well-tested and well-accepted statistical procedures”).
• 77 See LULAC , 548 US at 420 (Kennedy) (plurality) (criticizing partisan bias because it “may in large part depend on conjecture about where possible vote-switchers will reside”); Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos and Eric M. McGhee, Partisan Gerrymandering and the Efficiency Gap , 82 U Chi L Rev 831, 865–67 (2015) (discussing the imputation of results for uncontested races).
• 78 These are partisan bias, which is the divergence in the share of seats that each party would win given the same share of the statewide vote, see Grofman and King, 6 Election L J at 6 (cited in note 74), and the efficiency gap, which is “the difference between the parties’ respective wasted votes, divided by the total number of votes cast,” Stephanopoulos and McGhee, 82 U Chi L Rev at 851 (cited in note 77) (emphasis omitted).
• 79 See Samuel Issacharoff, Polarized Voting and the Political Process: The Transformation of Voting Rights Jurisprudence , 90 Mich L Rev 1833, 1844 (1992) (noting the “absence of an overriding conception of the precise constitutional harm the courts were seeking to remedy” in this period).
• 80 See White v Regester , 412 US 755, 765–70 (1973); Zimmer v McKeithen , 485 F2d 1297, 1305–07 (5th Cir 1973).
• 81 See Thornburg v Gingles , 478 US 30, 51 (1986). Importantly, while the pre- Gingles vote dilution cases were brought under the Fourteenth Amendment, dilution cases from Gingles onward have generally been launched under § 2 of the Voting Rights Act, codified at 52 USC § 10301.
• 82 Gingles , 478 US at 62 (Brennan) (plurality).
• 83 See, for example, Growe v Emison , 507 US 25, 40 (1993).
• 84 Minority voters can be disproportionately burdened by an electoral regulation (say, a photo identification requirement) whether or not they are polarized from the white majority.
• 85 The Gingles Court noted that “courts and commentators agree that racial bloc voting is a key element of a vote dilution claim,” Gingles , 478 US at 55, and endorsed the district court’s use of “methods standard in the literature for the analysis of racially polarized voting,” id at 53 n 20.
• 86 Geographic compactness is also a prerequisite for liability for vote dilution, while responsiveness is a factor to be considered at the later totality-of-circumstances stage. See id at 45, 50.
• 87 See id at 52–53 (referring to “two complementary methods of analysis—extreme case analysis and bivariate ecological regression analysis”).
• 88 See, for example, League of United Latin American Citizens, Council No 4434 v Clements , 999 F2d 831, 854 (5th Cir 1993) (en banc).
• 89 See, for example, Christopher S. Elmendorf and Douglas M. Spencer, Administering Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act after Shelby County, 115 Colum L Rev 2143, 2195–2215 (2015).
• 90 See, for example, Christopher S. Elmendorf, Kevin M. Quinn, and Marisa A. Abrajano, Racially Polarized Voting , 83 U Chi L Rev 587, 611–19 (2016); Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos, Civil Rights in a Desegregating America , 83 U Chi L Rev 1329, 1386–87 (2016).
• 91 See Ellen Katz, et al, Documenting Discrimination in Voting: Judicial Findings under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act since 1982 , 39 U Mich J L Ref 643, 663–75 (2006).
• 92 See, for example, Andrew Gelman and Gary King, Enhancing Democracy through Legislative Redistricting , 88 Am Polit Sci Rev 541, 545–46 (1994); Bernard Grofman, Michael Migalski, and Nicholas Noviello, The “Totality of Circumstances Test” in Section 2 of the 1982 Extension of the Voting Rights Act: A Social Science Perspective , 7 L & Pol 199, 202–09 (1985).
• 93 Adarand Constructors, Inc v Pena , 515 US 200, 230 (1995).
• 94 Ashcroft v American Civil Liberties Union , 542 US 656, 666 (2004).
• 95 See Richard H. Fallon Jr, Strict Judicial Scrutiny , 54 UCLA L Rev 1267, 1330 (2007). It is also worth clarifying how narrow tailoring fits into the terminology of words, concepts, and rules that we introduced earlier. We see it as a conceptual relationship , linking a challenged policy and an asserted governmental interest, that forms part of the doctrine of strict scrutiny.
• 96 See, for example, Adarand , 515 US at 227.
• 97 See, for example, Roe v Wade , 410 US 113, 155 (1973).
• 98 See, for example, Ashcroft , 542 US at 666.
• 99 See Lee Epstein and Gary King, The Rules of Inference , 69 U Chi L Rev 1, 2 (2002).
• 100 See Mark A. Graber, Unnecessary and Unintelligible , 12 Const Commen 167, 167 (1995) (“No necessary means exist in many cases for realizing certain purposes.”).
• 101 See Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos, Spatial Diversity , 125 Harv L Rev 1903, 1938 (2012).
• 102 Bendix Autolite Corp v Midwesco Enterprises, Inc , 486 US 888, 897 (1988) (Scalia concurring in the judgment).
• 103 United States v Virginia , 518 US 515, 533 (1996).
• 104 See, for example, id at 573–74 (Scalia dissenting).
• 105 Using our earlier terminology, the conceptual relationship here, between a challenged policy and an asserted governmental interest, essentially is the legal rule. This is not a problem for our analysis; it simply reflects the fact that doctrine is sometimes reducible to a single conceptual relationship.
• 106 See, for example, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v Casey , 505 US 833, 874 (1992) (O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter) (plurality) (“Only where state regulation imposes an undue burden on a woman’s ability to make this decision does the power of the State reach into the heart of the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause.”).
• 107 See, for example, Crawford v Marion County Election Board , 472 F3d 949, 950, 952–54 (7th Cir 2007) (applying a constitutional test assessing whether a law constitutes “an undue burden on the right to vote”).
• 108 See, for example, Granholm v Heald , 544 US 460, 493 (2005) (Stevens dissenting) (“[A] state law may violate the unwritten rules described as the ‘dormant Commerce Clause’ [ ] by imposing an undue burden on both out-of-state and local producers engaged in interstate activities.”).
• 109 505 US 833, 877 (1992) (O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter) (plurality). See also Burdick v Takushi , 504 US 428, 434 (1992) (focusing on “the character and magnitude of the asserted injury to the rights protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments”).
• 110 Casey , 505 US at 878 (O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter) (plurality). See also Burdick , 504 US at 434 (inquiring into whether the policy imposing the burden is “narrowly drawn to advance a state interest of compelling importance”).
• 111 Pike v Bruce Church, Inc , 397 US 137, 142 (1970). See also Storer v Brown , 415 US 724, 730 (1974) (commenting that there is “no litmus-paper test” for voting regulations, and that “[d]ecision in this context . . . is very much a matter of degree”) (quotation marks omitted).
• 112 By “doctrinal progress,” we simply mean articulating a more effective conceptual relationship. Of course, improvement on this axis may result in trade-offs along other dimensions.
• 113 See, for example, Burdick , 504 US at 434 (“[T]he rigorousness of our inquiry into the propriety of a state election law depends upon the extent to which a challenged regulation burdens First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.”).
• 114 504 US 555 (1992).
• 115 Id at 560 (brackets and ellipsis omitted).
• 116 Id at 561 (quotation marks omitted).
• 117 Richard M. Re, Relative Standing , 102 Georgetown L J 1191, 1217 (2014). See also Massachusetts v Environmental Protection Agency , 549 US 497, 543 (2007) (Roberts dissenting) (“As is often the case, the questions of causation and redressability overlap.”).
• 118 Cass R. Sunstein, What’s Standing after Lujan ? Of Citizen Suits, “Injuries,” and Article III , 91 Mich L Rev 163, 228 (1992).
• 119 US Const Art I, § 8, cl 18. Here too, the conceptual relationship essentially is the legal rule itself. See note 105.
• 120 Graber, 12 Const Commen at 170 (cited in note 100). See also, for example, United States v Comstock , 560 US 126, 134 (2010) (“[T]he word ‘necessary’ does not mean ‘absolutely necessary.’”).
• 121 Comstock , 560 US at 133–34 (quotation marks omitted). See also National Federation of Independent Business v Sebelius , 132 S Ct 2566, 2591–92 (2012).
• 122 Comstock , 560 US at 134.
• 123 132 S Ct 2566 (2012).
• 124 Id at 2591–92 (quotation marks omitted).
• 125 For further discussion of this point, see Richard A. Posner, Divergent Paths: The Academy and the Judiciary 117–21 (Harvard 2016).

Thanks to Jake Gersen, Todd Henderson, Daryl Levinson, Jens Ludwig, Richard McAdams, Tom Miles, Matthew Stephenson, David Strauss, Adrian Vermeule, Noah Zatz, and participants at a workshop at The University of Chicago Law School for helpful comments.

We are grateful to Susan Bandes, Elizabeth Foote, Jacob Gersen, Brian Leiter, Anup Malani, Richard McAdams, Elizabeth Mertz, Jonathan Nash, Eric Posner, Adam Samaha, Larry Solum, David Strauss, Noah Zatz, and participants in a work-inprogress lunch at The University of Chicago Law School for valuable comments. We are also grateful to the Chicago Judges Project, and in particular to Dean Saul Levmore, for relevant support.

We thank Eric Posner, Richard Posner, Peter Strauss, and Adrian Vermeule for helpful comments. We are also grateful to Rachael Dizard, Casey Fronk, Darius Horton, Matthew Johnson, Bryan Mulder, Brett Reynolds, Matthew Tokson, and Adam Wells for superb research assistance.

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How To Write A Legal Essay ?

‘Write an essay’ is  a routine question in LLB examinations and in the Civil Judge entrance examination.

Before to understand the essentials of writing an essay, we should first understand the meaning of the word ‘Essay’.

The word “Essay" derives from the French word “Essayer”, meaning "to try" or "to attempt". An essay is essentially an attempt to explain  the writer’s prospective on any given subject. It is an attempt to show what a writer think about the given subject. A skillfully written essay shows the analytical power, linguistic ability and power of expression of the writer.

Following are the steps for writing any essay:

1)      Context : First, the writer has to identify the given topic for the essay. What is the context, who will read the essay (audience)  and what is expected from a writer in the essay. It is necessary to find out the desired length of an essay. Should it be five paragraph or ten paragraph of may be twenty pages. At the first sight, the context of the topic should be identified and  understood.

2)      Essay –Plan :  Draw the plan : It is to plan that what is required to write to meet the objective of the topic. For this, writer must have  good information about the topic, must have read the discussion, relevant provision, judgments, article on the given topic so that a short essay can be written.

3)      Introduction : When writer commence writing an essay, he has to first give a introductory note on the giving topic. The introductory note can be initiated by the opening sentences like ‘Atrocity on women is the course on humanity’, ‘Reservation is an essential  for our society’. Introductory paragraph should be informative, catchy and attractive so that the reader get hooked by the paragraph and start reading the essay.

4)      Body content : After the introduction of the topic, one should come directly on the subject matter discussion and information sharing. Identify atleast three specific points which the writer would elaborate in the essay. Explain the identified points in considerable length. Support the explanation with few vital and convincing facts.  Body content must be full of facts which a reader should know. These facts should be relevant to the topic. The body content can have details like “After the amendment in the Indian Penal Code, the cases of dowry death started following in the police station and the society has started  abstaining from the family of accused of dowry matters.” “ Media has initiated a public trial and the politician were pronounced convicted in the eyes of public”. Body of content can be of two or three paragraph or even more. Length depends on the knowledge of the writer , requirement of the topic and the defined word count.

5)      Conclusion of the essay : The last paragraph should always be a concluding paragraph. By this paragraph, writer concludes his writing . It is paragraph where writer gives his thoughts on the topic, his personal view points, suggestion and a message to the reader. This paragraph shows the inner capacity of the  writer about the level of understanding and maturity with the writers.

6)      Language  of an essay :  The essay should be language of good quality. One should choose the word carefully. The sentence  may be short and easily understandable. Grammar should be correct. Avoid any ambiguous  words.  Abbreviation  should be strictly avoided. 

7)      Revise : Before finalizing the agreement one should revise the essay. The fair criticism to essay would be great help for improve in quality. Repetitive words should be picked out of the essay. If required, paragraphs should be rearranged.  It should be kept in mind at the time of revising the essay that it should meet the objective of writing it and justify  the ultimate purpose of writing the essay on the given topic.

8)        Check the Flow : Check the flow and rhythm of the sentences in the essay. One sentence should follow the other or should be in line with the same. The sentences should be sequentially arranged and give a flow to the reader. Any surprise or interruption to the flow  should be avoided. Sentence should be arranged in brick by brick manner.  The arrangement of sentence should give a feeling of comfort and easy flowing to the reader.

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Legal papers are documents regarding some sort of contractual relationship or some other rights . They are legal instruments , official documents, or some other type of important document. Usually, these documents concern authority , identity, legal status, ownership , or some other type of evidence for some sort of obligations. Examples of these documents include birth certificates, contracts , deeds , leases , titles , wills , etc. During a trial or in preparation of a trial , documents such as a complaint or a summons can also be referred to as legal papers. Additionally, in a general sense, a legal paper can refer to a simple document that is about any legal matter, such as a document written by a lawyer. It can also be a legally valid document. The general effects of these documents are that they affect and concern the legal rights of the people involved. Specific types of legal papers include but are not limited to articles of incorporation , derivative instruments, negotiable instruments, passports , ship’s papers , manifest , debenture , power of attorney , letters of administration , letters testamentary , working papers, enactment, bills, legal briefs , testaments , assignments , conveyances , income tax returns , l icenses , letters of patent , judgements , acquittances , judicial writ , affidavits , articles of impeachment , certificates , etc.

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Bar Exam Toolbox Podcast Episode 268: How to Avoid Common Bar Essay Writing Mistakes (w/Kelsey Lee)

In this episode, we discuss:

>Kelsey's background and work in the legal space

>Five common mistakes that students make when studying for or executing the writing portion of the See more + Welcome back to the Bar Exam Toolbox podcast! Today, we're excited to have Kelsey Lee with us -- one of our expert tutors from the Bar Exam Toolbox team. Join us as we discuss the most common pitfalls in bar essay writing, and share our top tips for mastering this portion of the exam.

>Five common mistakes that students make when studying for or executing the writing portion of the bar exam

>Five tips for mastering bar exam essay writing

>Private Bar Exam Tutoring (https://barexamtoolbox.com/private-bar-exam-tutoring/)

>Podcast Episode 10: Top 5 Bar Exam Essay Writing Tips (w/Ariel Salzer) (https://barexamtoolbox.com/podcast-episode-10-top-5-bar-exam-essay-writing-tips-w-ariel-salzer/)

>Podcast Episode 28: Balancing Law and Analysis on a Bar Exam Essay (https://barexamtoolbox.com/podcast-episode-28-balancing-law-and-analysis-on-a-bar-exam-essay/)

>Podcast Episode 69: 5 Things We Learned From Writing Bar Exam Sample Answers (https://barexamtoolbox.com/podcast-episode-69-5-things-we-learned-from-writing-bar-exam-sample-answers/)

>Podcast Episode 265: Quick Tips – What If You Run Out of Time While Writing a Bar Essay Answer? (https://barexamtoolbox.com/podcast-episode-265-quick-tips-what-if-you-run-out-of-time-while-writing-a-bar-essay-answer/)

>How To Be a Bar Exam Essay Writing Machine (https://barexamtoolbox.com/how-to-be-a-bar-exam-essay-writing-machine/)

>Legal Writing Tip: Imagine You're Talking to Your Grandma (https://lawschooltoolbox.com/legal-writing-tip-imagine-youre-talking-to-your-grandma/)

>What Are Bar Exam Graders Really Looking For? (https://barexamtoolbox.com/what-are-bar-exam-graders-really-looking-for/)

Download the Transcript (https://barexamtoolbox.com/episode-268-how-to-avoid-common-bar-essay-writing-mistakes-w-kelsey-lee/)

If you enjoy the podcast, we'd love a nice review and/or rating on  Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bar-exam-toolbox-podcast-pass-bar-exam-less-stress/id1370651486) or your favorite listening app. And feel free to reach out to us directly. You can always reach us via the contact form on the Bar Exam Toolbox website (https://barexamtoolbox.com/contact-us/). Finally, if you don't want to miss anything, you can sign up for podcast updates (https://barexamtoolbox.com/get-bar-exam-toolbox-podcast-updates/)!

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Biden immigration program offers legal status to 500,000 spouses of U.S. citizens. Here's how it works.

By Camilo Montoya-Galvez

Updated on: June 19, 2024 / 1:40 PM EDT / CBS News

President Biden on Tuesday  announced  a large-scale immigration program that will offer legal status and a streamlined path to U.S. residency and citizenship to roughly half a million unauthorized immigrants married to American citizens.

The Department of Homeland Security policy will allow these immigrants to apply for work permits and deportation protections if they have lived in the U.S. for at least 10 years and meet other requirements, senior administration officials said previewing the announcement.

Perhaps most importantly, however, Mr. Biden's move will unlock a path to permanent residency — colloquially known as a green card — and ultimately U.S. citizenship for many of the program's beneficiaries. 

"For those wives or husbands and their children who have lived in America for a decade or more, but are undocumented, this action will allow them to file paperwork for legal status in the United States, allowing them to work while they remain with their families in the United States," Mr. Biden said.

The policy, if upheld in court, would be the largest government program for undocumented immigrants since the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals  initiative, which currently shields 528,000 so-called "Dreamers" who were brought to the U.S. as children from deportation.

Mr. Biden announced the measure at a White House event on Tuesday marking the 12th anniversary of DACA, alongside another move to make it easier for employers to sponsor "Dreamers" and other undocumented immigrants for work visas.

It's the second time in one month that Mr. Biden has taken a sweeping — and legally risky — executive action on immigration. Earlier in June, he invoked a presidential power used frequently by former President Donald Trump to disqualify most migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border from asylum .

How Biden's immigration plan would work

The Biden administration program for undocumented immigrants married to U.S. citizens will provide two key immigration benefits.

It will allow eligible applicants to work and live in the U.S. legally on a temporary basis under the immigration parole authority. The policy, known as "Parole in Place," will also help these immigrants clear roadblocks in U.S. law that prevent them from getting permanent legal status without having to leave the country.

An immigrant who marries a U.S. citizen is generally eligible for a green card. But current federal law requires immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally to leave the country and re-enter legally to be eligible for a green card. Leaving the U.S. after living illegally in the country for certain periods of time can trigger a 10-year ban, leading many mixed-status families to not pursue this process.

The Biden administration's policy would allow eligible immigrants to obtain a green card without having to leave the U.S. After 3 to 5 years of living in the U.S. as a green card holder, immigrants can apply for American citizenship.

Administration officials estimate that roughly 500,000 unauthorized immigrants with U.S. citizen spouses will qualify for the program. Applicants must have been legally married to their American citizen spouse by June 17. Those who are deemed to pose a threat to national security or public safety will not qualify.

The policy is also expected to benefit an estimated 50,000 immigrant children with a parent who is married to a U.S. citizen, officials said. Undocumented stepchildren of U.S. citizens — who must also leave the country to obtain green cards — will be eligible to apply for the parole process if they are under the age of 21.

A senior administration official said the government is planning to open the Parole in Place program to applications "by the end of summer." The policy will almost certainly generate legal challenges, possibly from Republican-led states, which have sued the Biden administration over its immigration policies several times.

For over a decade, the U.S. government has overseen a more limited Parole in Place policy for unauthorized immigrants who are the immediate relatives of U.S. service members or veterans. In 2020, Congress affirmed that policy.

The State Department is also announcing on Tuesday a streamlined process for DACA recipients and other undocumented immigrants who have graduated from U.S. colleges to more easily obtain employment-based visas, such as H-1B visas for high-skilled workers.

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Camilo Montoya-Galvez is the immigration reporter at CBS News. Based in Washington, he covers immigration policy and politics.

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New law requires all Louisiana public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments

Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom. (AP produced by Javier Arciga)

FILE - Workers repaint a Ten Commandments billboard off of Interstate 71 on Election Day near Chenoweth, Ohio, Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023. Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom under a bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

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FILE - Workers remove a monument bearing the Ten Commandments outside West Union High School, Monday, June 9, 2003, in West Union, Ohio. Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom under a bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Al Behrman, File)

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom, the latest move from a GOP-dominated Legislature pushing a conservative agenda under a new governor.

The legislation that Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law on Wednesday requires a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities.

“If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses” who got the commandments from God, Landry said.

Opponents questioned the law’s constitutionality and vowed to challenge it in court. Proponents said the measure is not solely religious , but that it has historical significance. In the language of the law, the Ten Commandments are “foundational documents of our state and national government.”

The posters, which will be paired with a four-paragraph “context statement” describing how the Ten Commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries,” must be in place in classrooms by the start of 2025.

Under the law, state funds will not be used to implement the mandate. The posters would be paid for through donations.

The law also “authorizes” but does not require the display of other items in K-12 public schools, including: The Mayflower Compact, which was signed by religious pilgrims aboard the Mayflower in 1620 and is often referred to as America’s “First Constitution"; the Declaration of Independence; and the Northwest Ordinance, which established a government in the Northwest Territory — in the present day Midwest — and created a pathway for admitting new states to the Union.

Not long after the governor signed the bill into law at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic School in Lafayette on Wednesday, civil rights groups and organizations that want to keep religion out of government promised to file a lawsuit challenging it.

The law prevents students from getting an equal education and will keep children who have different beliefs from feeling safe at school, the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation said in a joint statement Wednesday afternoon.

“Even among those who may believe in some version of the Ten Commandments, the particular text that they adhere to can differ by religious denomination or tradition. The government should not be taking sides in this theological debate,” the groups said.

The controversial law, in a state ensconced in the Bible Belt, comes during a new era of conservative leadership in Louisiana under Landry, who replaced two-term Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards in January. The GOP holds a supermajority in the Legislature, and Republicans hold every statewide elected position, paving the way for lawmakers to push through a conservative agenda.

Similar bills requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms have been proposed in other states including Texas , Oklahoma and Utah. However, with threats of legal battles over the constitutionality of such measures, no state besides Louisiana has succeeded in making the bills law.

Legal battles over the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms are not new.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a similar Kentucky law was unconstitutional and violated the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says Congress can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The high court found that the law had no secular purpose but rather served a plainly religious purpose.

Associated Press reporter Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed.

The story has been corrected to clarify that the time for gubernatorial action did not lapse. The governor signed the bill Wednesday.

Why the hearing to free Julian Assange is happening on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific

Julian Assange's long-running legal odyssey has moved around the world, involving high-level negotiations across Australia, the United States, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Ecuador.  

And now, more than 14 years after WikiLeaks dropped a cache of classified US defence documents alleging war crimes in Afghanistan and Syria, his case has reached a courtroom on a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The Northern Mariana Islands is a US territory and one of the closest to mainland Australia. It shares a time zone with Australia's east coast.

Assange arrived on the island of Saipan about 6:30am, accompanied by Australia's ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd. 

Just over an hour later, he walked into the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, where he is set to enter a guilty plea as part of a deal with the US Department of Justice (DOJ) that will bring his fight for freedom to a close. 

The terms of the deal mean Assange is likely to be sentenced to time served, meaning at the close of proceedings, he will be free to travel to Australia.

After seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy and five years in Belmarsh Prison, Assange is now about to return to Australia. 

And like his legal battle has done plenty of times before, it brought another dramatic twist — one that has taken him from a high-security jail cell in England to the big blue of the Pacific.

Why the Northern Mariana Islands?

If you needed to be in an United States District Court, far from continental USA and close to home in Australia, the Northern Mariana Islands are a good option.

Saipan is the largest island and the capital of the territory, which begins roughly 70 kilometres north of Guam and stretches across 14 islands.

Like Guam or Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands are part of the US without the full status of a state.

After time as a colony of Spain, Germany and then Japan, the United States took control of the island in World War II after the Battle of Saipan in 1944; residents voted to become a US territory in 1975.

Residents are US citizens, but cannot vote in presidential elections.

Crucially, some of the islands, like Saipan, also host US district courts.

As the court hearing started, Judge Ramona Manglona who is presiding over the case said: "Not many people recognise we are part of the United States, but that is true."

On Tuesday, WikiLeaks posted on the social media platform X a video showing Australia's High Commissioner to the UK, Stephen Smith, in a vehicle with Assange.

It said the pair were in Bangkok. Assange's jet arrived in the Thai capital earlier in the day and took off again, bound for Saipan, just after 10:30pm local time (1:30am Wednesday, AEST).

With Assange in court today, he is roughly 3,000km from Australia. Hawaii is more than twice as far away, California further still.

US prosecutors said the location was important to Assange and that he wanted to go to a court close to Australia.

In a letter filed to the US court on Saipan, a Department of Justice official thanks the court for accommodating the matter "at the joint request of both of the parties".

The letter notes "the defendant's opposition to travelling to the continental United States to enter his guilty plea and the proximity of this federal US District Court to the defendant’s country of citizenship, Australia".

Assange and his legal team have long believed it would not be safe for him to enter the United States, but under the terms of the plea deal, it appears a compromise was found.

"He has to front up to charges that have been brought under US law," professor at the University of Sydney's law school Emily Crawford told Reuters.

"It had to be US territory, but it had to be the US territory closest to Australia that wasn't a US state like Hawaii."

Inside the courtroom 

Assange's case started at 9am when he entered the court room wearing a black suit.

Sat behind him were Mr Rudd, Mr Smith, and human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson.

All stood up as Judge Manglona entered the court room.

The judge then told the court the charge was "conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information," which carries a maximum penalty of up to 10-years in prison.

Assange was then asked to enter his plea to the specific charge, to which he said "guilty ".

However, in a l ast act of defiance against the US legal system, he said there were caveats to his guilt .

The judge then said she accepted the plea.

In an interview with the BBC yesterday, Assange's wife Stella said there was an agreement "in principle" with the US Department of Justice but the judge must have signed off on it before it became official.

"Once the judge signs off on it, then it is formally real," she said.

Judge Manglona has been serving as the court's chief judge since her nomination in 2011 by then US president Barack Obama after eight years as an associate judge.

The Saipan native was a trailblazer in the US federal legal system where among other achievements she was the first Indigenous woman to pass the local bar exam and the first and only woman to serve on this court.

Ms Assange said the deal they made with the US would be "made public, and I think it's a very interesting deal".

"The important thing here is that the deal involved time served — that if he signed it, he would be able to walk free," she told the BBC.

Under the deal he will be sentenced to 62 months of time that he has already served.

Assange left the island after the hearing and made his way back to Australia.

A surprise stop at island court   

Until yesterday, the next date on the calendar for Assange's legal matters was in early July when a UK court was due to hear his appeal against his extradition to the US.

The Australian government has long been pushing the US to resolve the case and recently US President Joe Biden said "we're considering it" when asked if he had a response to Canberra's request that he end Assange's prosecution. 

So there was some pressure and indication a deal might be possible, but little clue it would involve a trip to the Northern Mariana Islands. 

As news of the plea deal broke, pre-prepared videos from Ms Assange and WikiLeaks editor Kristinn Hrafnsson were released. 

In one, Mr Hrafnsson said: "If you're seeing this, that means he's out."

Meanwhile, the High Court in London on Tuesday sealed an order that revealed a "plea agreement" was signed between Assange and the US government on June 19.

While Assange has left the United Kingdom, he was due in court next month for an appeal hearing, and the proceedings still need to be formally terminated.

The order said conditional bail was approved to allow Assange to travel to Saipan to attend Wednesday's court hearing.

Assange was charged with 18 criminal offences in the US, including obtaining, receiving and disclosing classified information.

American officials declined to publicly discuss the plea deal before the hearing. 

"While the matter is pending, it's important for me not to comment on it at all," US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said. "Maybe tomorrow, we'll have more to say."

But the order released by the High Court in London says the agreement is for Assange to plead guilty to one of the 18 charges, with a "proposed sentence of time served".

It says it is "anticipated that a plea will be entered on Wednesday" and that after it is, "the United States have undertaken to withdraw the extradition request".

Following the conclusion of the court proceedings the DOJ released a lengthy statement revealing under the plea agreement Assange was prohibited from returning to the US without permission. 

ABC/Reuters

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DeSantis signs bill banning balloon releases in Florida. What's that mean for your next party?

Instead of a balloon release, environmental experts suggest eco-friendly, easily cleaned up alternatives that don't threaten wildlife..

Balloons are often at the scene for major life events, such as birthday parties, weddings, marathons and celebrations of life. As fun and sentimental as they are, far too many end up as litter in the state’s ecosystems.

On Monday, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a measure that would ban intentional balloon releases in the state, adding in some hefty fines for those who violate the law.

The Tallahassee Democrat wrote Florida's current law allows nine or fewer balloons to be released within a 24-hour period. However, this latest bill classifies the intentional release of all balloons inflated with a gas lighter than air as littering.

Oceana, a nonprofit ocean conservation organization, lobbied for the bill and stated the legislation's passage as a "great day for Florida's coastlines and ocean wildlife."

"Florida's new law will help save ocean animals from these preventable deaths," Oceana’s Florida Field Campaigns Manager Hunter Miller wrote in a statement. "While releasing balloons is sometimes used for celebrations, Floridians can opt for greener choices like bubbles, kites, planting trees, or making memorial gardens."

Intentional balloon releases in Florida: What is HB 321?

House Bill 321 , dubbed the "Release of Balloons" bill, seeks to ban any intentional balloon releases in the state.

According to  the bill's analysis , it revises the penalties for intentionally releasing balloons by specifying that a person commits littering if they intentionally release, organize the release of, or intentionally cause to be released balloons inflated with a gas that is lighter than air.

Weather, research and hot air balloons that are recovered after flight would still be allowed.

When will HB 321 take effect?

With DeSantis' signature, the bill would take effect on Monday, July 1.

Is there an exemption for biodegradable balloons?

Biodegradable balloons are often made from a natural latex, according to EcoFreak . However, the bill will remove the previous exemption for balloons that have been determined by FWC rules to be biodegradable or photodegradable.

What are the legal consequences of having a balloon release in Florida?

HB 321 would classify the intentional release of all balloons inflated with a gas lighter than air as littering, and people who violate the law could be subject to a $150 fine. Of that amount, $50 would go to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection's solid waste management trust fund.

For balloons over 15 pounds, fines could reach up to $1,000.

These penalties do not apply to children under 6, according to the bill.

How bad are balloons for the environment?

Nonprofit organization Oceana  shared that scientists estimate that 33 billion pounds of plastic wash into the ocean every year, which equates to about two garbage trucks’ worth of plastic entering the ocean every minute.

Balloons are typically made of foil or latex and are inflated with a gas lighter than air. They are sealed with plastic ribbons, valves, tie-off discs, and clips. The  bill's own analysis  states when balloons are released, they drift away and eventually fall somewhere becoming litter, which can be dangerous to wildlife and the environment.

"Balloons take years to break down and often end up in waterways or the ocean, where they can be swallowed by marine animals. Turtles have been found to selectively eat burst balloons because they look like jellyfish, their natural food," the description reads.

Continuing: "Balloons, along with any ribbons or plastic discs attached, can harm animals by blocking their airways or becoming lodged in their intestines. Ribbons and strings from balloons can also become entangled round birds and other animals, making them unable to move."

In which states are balloon releases illegal?

In addition to Florida, several other states have passed or put forward legislation to ban or limit balloon releases outdoors, such as:

• Connecticut
• Rhode Island

I was planning on doing a balloon release. What should I do instead?

Already have plans to hold a balloon release for an upcoming event this year? It's not too late to pivot.  Party With a Cause  shared some eco-friendly, easily cleaned up alternatives to the popular balloon releases, such as

• Wish Papers
• Fabric Flag Bunting
• (Biodegradable) Confetti toss
• Powder canon
• Float flowers or candles
• Natural boats
• Plant a tree
• Memorial garden

Contributing: Ana Goñi-Lessan , Tallahassee Democrat/USA TODAY Network-Florida