Essay Writing Advice by Professor Tarun Khaitan
It is an honour to welcome Professor Tarun Khaitan to my blog.
Tarun Khaitan is the Professor (Chair) of Public Law at the LSE Law School and an Honorary Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School. Previously, he has been the Head of Research at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights (Oxford), the Professor of Public Law and Legal Theory (Oxford), Vice Dean (Faculty of Law, Oxford), and a Visiting Professor of Law (Chicago, Harvard, and NYU law schools).
He completed his undergraduate studies (BA LLB Hons) at the National Law School (Bangalore) in 2004 as the 'Best All-Round Graduating Student'. He then came to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and completed his postgraduate studies at Exeter College. His research has been cited in over a dozen cases by influential courts, including the Indian Supreme Court, the Canadian Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the Israeli Supreme Court, the Pakistani Supreme Court, the Madras High Court, the High Court of Kerala, the Superior Court of Quebec, the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, and in the Opinion of the Advocate General before the European Court of Justice. His research has also been cited in the Indian Parliament.
The blog post below includes some of his best advice, in bullet-point form, on how to write legal essays, as summarized by me based on this YouTube video… I am sure you will enjoy reading it! Please keep in mind that this post is only a teaser: for the full range of his excellent advice, kindly watch the full video.
How to Write a Good Law School Essay
Guest Post by Professor Tarun Khaitan
Here are some of the key takeaways in relation to essay writing by Professor Khaitan:
Be kind to your reader: think about making your assessor’s task easy.
An essay has to be argumentative.
Try to answer with precision the question you were asked, not to show off your knowledge on the general subject matter at hand.
An essay is not a textbook; it has to include an argument or a series of arguments.
An argument should be made up of premises and then a conclusion.
You need to create an argument map in your head before writing our essay.
If you have, for instance, 60 minutes to write an essay, spend 10-15 minutes creating the argument map. Once this is done, the actual writing bit is easy.
Time keeping is of outmost importance; some excellent students manage their time badly and end up with mediocre marks. This partly happens due to their perfectionism: they spend too much time to answer one question perfectly and run out of time for the other questions.
Train yourself to write under exam conditions, so that you are not caught unawares when the exam actually comes.
You need to first figure out your hypothesis, i.e. your one-sentence answer to the essay question.
Then, you need to list all your arguments in support of your hypothesis.
Then you need to spot all the counterarguments to your arguments.
It is worth noting that all aforementioned arguments need to be supported by evidence, the evidence being case law, statutes, secondary sources etc…
If you possess let’s say five cases in support of your argument, and three cases against your argument, you cannot ignore the opposing case law.
Instead, you need to find compelling reasons why the court got it wrong in these three cases, or why the dominant interpretation of these cases is wrong, or that these three cases appear to go against your argument but in fact they don’t, or you might need to tweak your argument to explain these three cases.
I hope you enjoyed the excellent advice by Professor Khaitan! For more of his advice, kindly watch the YouTube video.
For more advice on how to write good legal essays and achieve excellent marks, you can also grab a copy of my book here.