Help writing Law essays!

Here’s a nice detour for our blog!  One of my favourite cousins asked me to help her with her essay for Health Law.  It’s been about five years since I’ve written a law essay, but I put some time into helping her out anyway.  The following post is the culmination of fifty minutes rough work – it’s not pretty, I haven’t worried much about the formatting or the flow; it’s just a brain-dump.  Standard “don’t rely on this” disclaimer applies.  If you found this page because you need help writing your law essay, I hope it helps!  If it does, please take the time to post a comment.

Essay Question: Write a 2000 word essay examining whether the purpose of the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003 is achieved. Use the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal decision in 341/Med10/154P Pollard (Breach of confidentiality) on which to base your analysis.

My Ramblings: Okay, so – step one:  Introduction.  Do this first.  The easiest way is to repeat the essay question, but word it out.  Recognise key words, such as ‘examine’, ‘purpose’, ‘achieved’.  For example:

In this essay, I will examine whether the purpose of the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act (2003) is achieved in the present-day environment.  I will begin this examination with an analysis of the purpose of the Act.  I will then investigate a relevant case from the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal, and discuss the key facts and outcomes.  Once I have reached a clear understanding of both the purpose of the Act and the facts of the case, I will apply the outcomes of the case to the purpose of the Act, and examine whether those outcomes uphold the purpose of the Act.  Finally, I will present a conclusion as to whether the purpose of the Act is achieved in the current system.

People always think it’s easiest to write the intro last.  I only learned after like four years at Uni, that writing the intro is like planning the way you’re going to tackle the assignment. If you look at what I wrote there in the intro, you can chop it out into sentences, use each sentence as a header for a new section of your essay, and it will guide you.  Watch this:

1)  I will begin this examination with an analysis of the purpose of the Act.

• <insert examination of the purpose section here>

2)  I will then investigate a relevant case from the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal, and discuss the key facts and outcomes.

• <insert discussion of the Pollard case here>

3)  I will apply the outcomes of the case to the purpose of the Act, and examine whether those outcomes uphold the purpose of the Act.

• <insert a section where you apply the purpose of the Act to the outcomes of the case>

4)  Finally, I will present a conclusion as to whether the purpose of the Act is achieved in the current system.

• <come to your conclusion about whether the purpose has been realised>

… See?   The introduction will help you build the whole remaining 1900 words! Just reflect on that for a minute… Now, before we carry on, lets look at your word limits.  Your 2000 word limit generally means:

• 10% intro
• 30% discussion of the relevant law  (the discussion of the purpose of the Act)
• 50% application of relevant law
• 10% conclusion

So you have about 1000 words where you need to be directly saying “here is what the relevant law says should happen, and here is what actually happened in the case”, and saying whether or not each of your recognised points was a case of the purpose being realised or not.  That’s actually not a lot of room to discuss something in detail.

Okay getting on with it: Now, the next thing to remember is to complete your essay in that order (above).  The essay question is asking you to discuss whether the purpose of the Act is achieved, so obviously, before you answer, you’re going to need to understand what the purpose was!  Easiest place to do this of course is in the Act itself… in the ‘purpose’ section!  Here’s a link to the purpose section itself: http://bit.ly/ij67RV And here’s a link to the whole Act: http://bit.ly/lz4SBq.

Okay, what’s the purpose?  Read through, maybe even print it, and highlight the key words. Also cross out the words that confuse things:

Purpose of Act

1. The principal purpose of this Act is to protect the health and safety of members of the public by providing for mechanisms to ensure that health practitioners are competent and fit to practise their professions.
2. This Act seeks to attain its principal purpose by providing, among other things,—

1. for a consistent accountability regime for all health professions; and
2. for the determination for each health practitioner of the scope of practice within which he or she is competent to practise; and
3. for systems to ensure that no health practitioner practises in that capacity outside his or her scope of practice; and
4. for power to restrict specified activities to particular classes of health practitioner to protect members of the public from the risk of serious or permanent harm; and
5. for certain protections for health practitioners who take part in protected quality assurance activities; and
6. for additional health professions to become subject to this Act.

You’ll notice I didn’t touch (d), (e), and (f).  This is because, conceptually, (d) is very similar to (c), and (e) and (f) don’t seem to add anything relevant to your essay focus.  Now, string those together:

The principal purpose of this Act is to protect the health and safety of members of the public, and to ensure that health practitioners are competent and fit to practice.  It will do this by providing a way to determine the scope within which a practitioner is competent to practice, and to restrain them to operating within that scope; and providing a method to hold practitioners accountable.*

There!  Now you have a clear, succinct description of the purpose – you just need to discuss it a bit.  Remember, check your word count – this section should only be about 600 words, and that’s already over 10% of that.

*note – make sure that you don’t change the meaning of the purpose of the Act when you do this; you’re only trying to take out the unneeded verbiage.  I’m tired, so I may have changed the meaning in that excerpt.  Make sure you don’t, you’ll lose marks for saying it means one thing when it means something slightly different.

Now, that’s it for the introduction and the first section. You have 600 words where you need to be discussing the actual law – what the Act says: what it’s purpose is, how it sets out to implement this (make sure you reference additional parts in the Act, not just the Purpose section).  You are also going to want to discuss a bit about the Pollard case here, since the judge’s reasoning in this case is influential on the way future judges will interpret the Act, so it’s become part of the relevant law.  But leave most of this for the Application section.

OK that’s pretty much it from me.  As I said, that was 1 hour work.  Forgive the fact that it’s a bit garbled – it’s only meant to be a quick helpful sketch.  Again, if this method helps you out, please post a comment!