Legal Writing: How a Law Article Is Built

In one line

A law article answers one question that the law has not yet settled, argues one position on it, and proves every step from sources the reader can check.

In exam wording: legal writing is the presentation of legal analysis in a form that can be verified by the reader, and an article differs from an essay in that it advances a claim which the author accepts could be shown to be wrong.

What an article is not

Start here, because the commonest failure in a student article is not bad writing. It is that no claim was made.

It is not a summary of the law. A description of what section 89 of the Code of Civil Procedure says is a note, not an article. If a reader can get the same content from the bare Act, nothing has been written.

It is not a collection of what other people have said. Ten paragraphs beginning "According to Sharma" and ending "thus we can see" is a literature review, and even that has to end somewhere.

It is not an opinion piece. "Arbitration in India is very slow and something must be done" states a mood. An article states a proposition, and the proposition has to be one that a reader could disagree with on the law.

It is not neutral. An article that carefully sets out both sides and then stops has done half a job. A judgment is neutral until the end; an article takes a position from the beginning and spends its length defending it.

The one thing an article must have: a research question

Everything else follows from this, so get it right before writing a sentence.

A research question is a question about the law that:

• can be answered, so not "is arbitration fair";
• is not already answered, so not "is a Lok Adalat award appealable", which section 21 of the Legal Services Authorities Act settles in a line;
• is narrow enough to answer in the space you have, so not "should India reform arbitration";
• and matters to somebody, so the article can say who is affected by the answer.

Compare three attempts at the same subject:

The third is a real article. Notice that it names the section, states two possible answers, and could be got wrong.