Skills required for success as a law student

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‘What does law do?’ ‘How does it do what it does?’ and ‘How should it do what it does?’ are all basic questions that have engaged the minds of philosophers and lawyers for more than two thousand years. For students with the right aptitude, who are prepared to work hard at developing their analytical skills, the academic study of law offers the possibility of engaging with challenging questions such as these and of developing the kind of transferable skills which many employers value highly.

• Working hard
• Learning the law
• Linguistic and analytical skills

Working hard

Law students require a variety of aptitudes and, to use a more specifically practical word, skills. Reduced to their most basic, what is required is an aptitude for hard work, coupled with an analytical mind, which enjoys the challenge of expressing difficult ideas clearly. Furthermore, there is no escaping the fact that much of the hard work will involve a great deal of reading and note-taking; and much of this, will, at least in the short term, be heavy going and unexciting. However, if undertaken properly, this work, will over a period of time, accumulate into a substantial body of knowledge, which can then be applied to the key tasks of writing essays and solving problems, by way of both coursework and examination.

It is important to emphasise the need for hard work as an essential part of studying law, because far too many students are tempted to think that they can succeed by relying on what they imagine to be their natural ability, without bothering to add the expenditure of effort. To take an analogy, some people prefer the more or less instant gratification, which comes from watching a television adaptation of a classic novel to the rather more laborious process of reading the novel itself. Those who prefer watching television to reading the book are less likely to study law successfully, unless they rapidly acquire a taste for text-based materials.

Learning the law

It is also important to emphasise that studying law is a cumulative process. This means that you must absorb, understand and retain at least the main principles of every subject that you study, so that you will be able to apply them to other subjects later on. For example, you will need a sound grasp of foundation subjects such as contract law and administrative law before you can progress successfully to subjects such as employment law and environmental law.

Incidentally, it is often said that lawyers neither know nor need to know any more law than other people, but that they simply need to know where to look it up. While it is of course, true that many lawyers do frequently look things up, there are various reasons why it is quite simply untrue to say that they neither know nor need to know any more law than other people do.

The first point is that, in common with members of other learned professions, lawyers are expected to know a lot of material. There are several reasons why this is so.

1. First, as a matter of psychology, clients are unlikely to have much confidence in lawyers who plainly know no law.

2. Secondly, lawyers who have to spend time on getting themselves onto an equal footing with their more knowledgeable competitors before they can start spending time on the key task of giving advice or providing other professional services will have to charge more than their competitors charge. It follows that lawyers who do not know the law will be at a commercial disadvantage against competitors who do know a lot of law, since those who know the least will have to charge the most.

3. Thirdly, having found the law, you need to be able to understand it. This requires both a good grasp of that area of law known as legal method (so that you can understand and apply the sources you have looked up), and a wider knowledge of the law relating to various topics. After all, there is no point in looking up a legal rule, which seems to dispose of your case if you are unaware of another and more authoritative rule, which will prevail.

Consider this example:

• Suppose your client’s widowed mother has died without leaving a will, and that your client is her only child. If you simply look up the Act of Parliament dealing with inheritance of property in situations where there is no will, you will conclude that your client is entitled to inherit the whole of his or her mother’s estate. However, suppose that your client killed his or her mother. This may have been by murder or manslaughter, or, perhaps more probably, by being the driver of a car in which the mother was a passenger and which was involved in an accident for which your client was responsible and as a result of which the mother died.

The Act of Parliament which lays down the rules of succession where there is no will makes no mention of the fact that those rules are subject to an additional set of rules, which seek to prevent people benefiting from their own wrongdoing. He additional rules, which originated in the courts but have since been developed by another Act of Parliament, may or may not (depending on all circumstances of the case) prevent your client from inheriting. It follows that a lawyer who merely identifies the first Act of Parliament, but who is unaware of the additional rules contained in both case law and the later Act of Parliament, may give bad advice.

4. Fourthly there will be many occasions in professional practice when it is simply impossible to look up the law and lawyers must, therefore, rely on their legal knowledge. For example, they may be in a meeting with clients, or appearing as advocates in court, when only a few textbooks may be available, and pressure of time may mean that even these can be used only to jog the memory, rather than as sources on which to base research.

Linguistic and analytical skills

Quite apart from the capacity to work hard, law students require good linguistic and analytical skills. Although these may sound like, and in some cases will indeed be, two distinct skills, in practical terms they often merge into one. For example, take an Act of Parliament, which, among other things, prohibits the possession of obscene articles for publication for gain, except where publication is

‘justified as being for the public good on the ground that it is in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of general concern.’

Clearly this exception would apply to the depiction of nudity in classical art and to the publication of photographs of human genitals in medical textbooks. But what about cases involving articles which are plainly obscene on any sensible meaning of the word? Can the defence argue that such articles are nevertheless lawful because they help some people to release their frustrations through sexual fantasies, and that the consequent reduction in the number of sexual offences is plainly the object of general concern?

A linguistically perceptive response to this question would proceed on the following lines. If the exception applies to any ‘objects of general concern,’ why did Parliament specify the preceding categories (namely ‘science, literature, art or learning’)? Is it not reasonable therefore, to interpret the words ‘other objects of general concern’ as being limited to other things of the same kind as those, which are specified? Thus the argument for the defence does not justify the application of the exception.

Furthermore, and quite apart from purely linguistic considerations, when the content of the argument for the defence is analysed, it becomes plain that what is really being claimed is that the availability of obscene articles can be justified simply on the ground that they are obscene. It is difficult to see how anyone could reasonably regard this as a credible interpretation of an Act of Parliament, which was passed in order to subject obscene articles to strict controls.

As a final point on the need for good language skills, it may be useful to consider a classical legal anecdote. The story is told of a judge who, having listened patiently to an advocate who was making a long and learned submission, said, “Well, Mr Smith, having listened to all you have had to say, I must confess that I am none the wiser.’ ‘Perhaps not, my Lord,’ replied the advocate, ‘but at least your Lordship is better informed.’ Whether or not you find this funny may be a good indicator of whether you are sufficiently sensitive to nuances of meanings to be likely to succeed as a law student.

This content has been taken from Studying Law, by Simon Askey and Ian McLeod.