The method › The method behind the method
The method behind the method
Every drill, guide and model answer on this site is built to one method, and the method is not ours. It comes from Glanville Williams’s Learning the Law. This page is the acknowledgement: five of his principles, in his own words, and what each one built here.
A 1969 English book
Glanville Williams wrote Learning the Law as a guide to the craft of studying law: how to read a case and find what it actually decides, how to answer a problem question, how to write legal prose. The edition on our shelf is the eighth, published in London in 1969, and the book is still read more than fifty years on — not for its law, which is English law as it stood in 1969 and has largely been superseded, but for its technique, which has not dated at all.
That is why a 1969 English book can sit behind an Australian tutoring site without embarrassment. The method transfers; the law does not. Each principle below is given in his words, from the eighth edition, followed by the one thing it built here. Nothing on this page asks you to do anything. It exists because a site that borrows its method this heavily ought to say so.
Every word has a purpose
“Almost every word has been put in for a purpose and needs to be commented upon.”
He is describing a well-made examination problem, and it is the first design rule for every practice drill on this site. A drill’s facts contain little beyond the material ones: every sentence that stays is load-bearing, and a sentence no good answer would need to comment on is cut before the drill ships. So when a drill feels sparse, read it the way he read problems — the sparseness is the design, and the words that survived the cut are the ones doing the work. The same principle governs the answering end, where he tells you to “aim at concentrating all your intelligence on the specific question, and bring in your knowledge only so far as it is relevant.” (p 137) That is why the model answers here never pad to display coverage.
Argue; do not assert
“Pretend to yourself that the examiner will disagree with your point of view, and set yourself to win him over by argument.”
This is the whole distance between the two model answers under every drill here. The Pass answer is correct but basic: it names the issue, states the rule, applies it and concludes, and it would pass. The H1 answer does everything the Pass answer does and then argues — it takes the genuinely open point both ways before concluding, because a bald conclusion cannot be told apart from a lucky guess. And where a drill has planted a route that looks open but fails on these facts, the H1 answer shows the route and says why it fails; the reveal each drill closes with, The tempting wrong turn, exists because silence cannot be told apart from judgment. Where a point is genuinely open, Williams is blunt: “In all legal problems, have the courage to argue.” (p 115)
A case travels with its facts
“To dispel his suspicion, you must give some statement of the concrete facts.”
The suspicion belongs to the examiner, and it attaches to any rule cited with a bare case name: the rule looks borrowed from a textbook and the name from its footnote. So on this site a case never travels alone. Every case cited in a guide or a model answer carries at least one concrete fact and the legal ground of its decision, because citation is a means to establishing legal principle, never an end in itself. Notice what this frees you from: the fact and the ground are what count, and “The name is the least important part of the case.” (p 87)
Rule first, then application
“Much the better practice is first to state the rule of law and then to apply it to the facts.”
One sentence of Williams, two of the four steps that run through everything here: spot the issue, state the rule, apply it to the facts, conclude. His sentence is steps two and three in their fixed order, and the order is the point — an answer that applies before it states, or that concludes and leaves the rule to be inferred, has broken the sequence however right its conclusion turns out to be. The four steps give you the routine for a whole answer; the shape of each rule gives you the routine for a single paragraph, and both live at Six shapes and one twist.
The designed omission
“Always look for such omissions and state how your answer will be affected by the presence or absence of the fact in question.”
The omissions are not accidents. Williams set problems with an important fact deliberately left out, because knowing what gaps exist in the facts is a mark of a competent lawyer — and the gap-spotting drills here are built the same way, with the missing fact chosen before a word of the problem is written. The model answer splits exactly as he directs: (i) if the fact is present… (ii) if it is absent… And the drill closes with the row that asks, And if the facts were different… — the aliter, how the answer changes on the facts you were not given. The gap is the point of the drill, and finding it is the skill being drilled.
What was left behind
Taking a method from a 1969 book means leaving most of the book where it lies, and being open about that. The law in it is English law as at 1969: the assizes and quarter sessions it describes were abolished in 1971, two years after this edition appeared; the House of Lords’ judicial work passed to the United Kingdom Supreme Court in 2009; most of the statutes he cites have been repealed; his criminal procedure — felonies, arrestable offences — is history. His chapter on legal careers is a snapshot of the English profession of 1969, period evidence rather than advice, and it carries period assumptions, including the assumption that the student is male. None of that crosses over.
Nor do his cases. Leaving them behind is not just housekeeping; it is the same discipline this site applies to its own pages. The rule that governs every drill and guide here — Australian authority only, for every rule a problem turns on — is Williams’s own relevancy principle applied to Williams himself: keep what bears on the question, and leave the rest, however good, on the shelf. The book supplied the how. The law of this country supplies the what.
And that is all this page is. There is nothing here to practise and nothing to memorise. When you are ready to work, the method itself is waiting at Six shapes and one twist, and every practice drill on the site will quietly hold you to the standards above.