Law School Essay Exams: Focus on the Key Facts

“Legal problem solving—identifying and diagnosing problems and generating strategies and tactics to achieve client goals—is the most basic function of a legally trained person. Most legal problem solving activities involve some legal analysis: combining the law and the facts to generate, justify and evaluate the substance of the legal problem.” (Legal Services Practice Manual: Skills, 2010)

All lawsuits arise as a result of disputes involving facts. Our legal system revolves around the resolution of disputes through the application of the rules of law to the facts of a case. Yes, trials and appeals are about “law,” but remember that the trial court judge, or jury, is known as the “fact judge.” Findings of fact are so important that the Bill of Rights guarantees that the facts, once decided by a jury, are virtually the last word. The Seventh Amendment states that, “…no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise reviewed in any court of the United States, than in accordance with the rules of common law.” This clause prohibits any court from re-examining or overturning the findings of fact made by a jury, unless the findings of fact are clearly in error.

The two main components of the dispute resolution process are the applicable law and the facts of the dispute. In the professional practice of law, you will review the case file to identify which of the hundreds or thousands of facts produced by the discovery (for example, witness statements, depository transcripts, responses to interrogatories, photographs, and correspondence) are “key.” . ” facts. Key facts are those facts that are critical to the outcome of the case. A key fact is so essential that if it were changed, the outcome of the case might well be different.

In law school, he is practicing this skill of focusing on the facts: in order for him to learn to evaluate legal problems, he must be able to find the important facts… the key facts, the facts on which the outcome of the problem is based. . in question depends. When writing an answer to a law school essay exam question, you need to discover these salient facts from all the facts presented in the narrative. Think of them as keys that open discussions about punctuation issues.

But how? These are the basic steps in determining which facts are key facts.

• Identify each statement possibly raised by the test question.
• Indicate the rules that will be used to resolve each issue of each claim. These rules include the elements that must be addressed in the discussion of each topic.
• Point out which facts in the question are likely to be related to the elements of those problems.

This last step consists of determining which facts may be legally significant. Legally significant facts may be, for example, that a tenant with an eviction notice has never had a hot water supply; or that the shooter was an off-duty cop; or that one of the parties to a contract has been a minor; or that the geographical distance between the provocative incident and the murder may have been long enough to provide adequate time for a reasonable person to “cool off” the heat of her passion.

After outlining your answer, read the test question one more time carefully and quickly (you should be quite familiar with the question by now, so the reading may be much faster than the first time). Make sure you have assigned all the facts presented in the hypothetical question (the test) to a problem. If not, ask yourself if these facts suggest another problem, can be used to further explain a problem you already noted, or are just “red herrings” (facts in the question that could lead you to the wrong discussion). Then use this fact-rich outline as a roadmap to answer the question. Note that your outline does not need to include explanations of why the facts are important: the detailed analysis comes in your answer. The outline is just your writing guide.

As for the outline, you might want to stick with a traditional outline pattern (bullets, hierarchies, mind maps, etc.)… or, to accentuate your fact finding, you might want to think about a two-column approach. . You can summarize your answer using two separate columns. Specifically, you can list the issues in one column, and then write down the facts that need to be discussed in relation to those rules in the column next to it. This method will allow you to relate the issues or subtopics of law to the facts of the question. By skimming the question quickly (again) before writing the essay, you can quickly notice if you’ve missed a fact.

Long before you face exams, work on recognizing key facts. Focus on the key facts when reporting cases for the class. Some students find that including basic fact patterns in their do-it-yourself course outlines, such as illustrations of the rules that appear on the outlines, helps them think about the rules in situational terms.

Many years ago, when I was a little boy, the fictional Los Angeles Police Sergeant Joe Friday, the hero of the television series “Dragnet,” used to tell witnesses he interviewed, “All we want is the facts.” Well, there’s more to it than that when you’re trying to get a high score on a law school writing test… but Sgt. Friday focused on one of two essential components: you should too!