Every semester begins the same: you make a sweeping declaration to your friends that you will start attending every lecture, do the prescribed readings and stay on top of all your classes. But as the weeks go by, the readings and lectures begin to pile up and before you know it, it’s week six and you are staring at a blank Word document with no idea how to begin your assignment.
That’s where Property Law Q&A comes in and saves the day. Instead of trawling through hours of recorded lectures to find the relevant content you need, this book contains nearly all the topics that you are likely to cover in your Property Law course. This book will be particularly useful for ‘problem question’ style assignments and exams. When I sat down to write my assignment, which asked me to provide legal advice in relation to the ‘doctrine of fixtures’, all I had to do was refer to the relevant chapter in the book.
The book presented an easy-to-follow and systematic approach to answering problem and exam questions, as well as a helpful list of relevant authorities for each legal topic. Each chapter began with a summary of the key issues and a ‘roadmap’ on how to tackle them. Each question is followed by a suggested answer plan, sample answer and comments on how an examiner might assess the answer. The example questions ranged from ‘problem question’ and essay question formats. The author also offers advice on potential errors to avoid when answering questions in the “Keep in Mind” section, which is incredibly useful for exam preparation.
Bear in mind, these Q&A books are not to be treated as your average textbook. Large textbooks, while useful in containing bulk amounts of legal knowledge, can be intimidating and rather tedious to read. Instead, this book is the perfect complement to those textbooks. It will help to translate all the theoretical concepts you learnt in the lecture into real-life, practical problem questions that you’ll likely to get in an exam or in practice. This book sets out the law and how to apply it in an incredibly straightforward and concise manner. While I do not recommend relying solely on this Q&A book as your only source of reference for the entire course, it is the perfect study companion for those of us who struggle to wrap our minds around all the legal jargon and Latin phrases used in conventional textbooks.
An issue that I, along with many other law students, often struggle with is applying theoretical knowledge to a problem question. Where do you start? What cases do you use? What are the examiners looking for in a high-scoring answer? This book contains all those answers. Knowing that these Q&A books exist now, I wish that someone had informed me of their existence earlier. There is a Q&A book for practically every compulsory law course, from Trusts to Torts. Given how precious time becomes in the lead up to exams and assignments, these Q&A books are truly the answer to our prayers.
Enjoyed this post? Sign up for the Survive Law weekly newsletter for more.