HOW TO ANSWER A LAW PROBLEM QUESTION
The problem that students encounter when studying law is: knowing everything. There is so much to read and so little time to do it. If you skip some material, or a case you are none the wiser. So throughout our years of teaching law we have devised a system and we are going to share this with you.
You may have encountered different methods or formulas to help when advising a client in a mock scenario. One of example is the IRAC method or another is Celo. These are well documented and you can read about these. I never used them, because I had a method in my head that worked. It was not until I started teaching that I spoke about it. I call my method the “Fact Law Sandwich”. Let me explain. If you are asked to advise a party as to their legal rights this is how you present it:
FACTS
GENERAL PRINCIPLE
LAW
APPLY TO FACTS
This Fact Sandwich Method opens up how to answer a law problem question. In Fact: simply state what you have been told, this why you can never be accused of not considering the facts. In General principle: you simply state what the general rule of the relevant issue is. You express it as if you are speaking to a child who has no knowledge of law. In Law: you state “using the authority of…..and you go on to state which statute or case helps prove your point. Lastly in Apply to Facts: you apply the reasoning of the case to your factual scenario. Your advice will sound and look structured and professional. The reason it is called the “Fact Law Sandwich”, is because the advice contains two outer layers of facts that sandwich the principle and law in the middle.
The books we have published are written to provide the student with a good knowledge of the most important cases on their study. They are written in a way to facilitate the Fact Law Sandwich method provided here. I provide the general principle, the name of the case with full citation, the facts, the Ratio (the thing the lecturers say you always need to use), and application i.e. how the case should be applied. No other book provides this information at your fingertips. Please have a look at our publishing page to see our books.
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