Answering Problem Questions in Law: The ILAC Method

The lecture below was recorded in 2021 for students at BRAC University School of Law. This written guide was added in August 2026 for readers who would rather have the method on the page than in the video.

A problem question does not ask what you know. It asks what you can do with what you know, which is a different examination and a harder one. The candidate who recites everything the course covered on a topic will lose to the candidate who identifies the one point the facts actually turn on and argues it properly. ILAC (Issue, Law, Application, Conclusion) is the structure that makes the second kind of answer possible, and its real function is not tidiness. It is a discipline that forces you to separate four operations that students otherwise perform all at once, badly.

Issue

The issue is the legal question the facts raise, stated precisely enough that answering it disposes of something.

Most weak answers fail here, before any law has been cited. They name a topic rather than a question. ‘This raises the issue of negligence’ is a topic. ‘Whether a duty of care was owed to a claimant who was not physically present at the scene’ is an issue, because it can be answered yes or no, and the answer changes the outcome.

Three habits help.

• Count the issues. A problem question usually contains more than one, and they are rarely of equal weight. Deal with each separately and in the order the facts make natural, which is often chronological.
• Frame each as a question. If you cannot put a question mark at the end of your issue statement, it is a topic and you have not finished thinking.
• Say what turns on it. An issue that changes nothing is not worth the words. Examiners set facts deliberately; a detail that seems gratuitous is usually load-bearing.

Law

State the governing rule, from its source, at the level of generality the issue requires.

This is where students over-write. The temptation is to prove you did the reading by setting out the whole doctrinal landscape. Resist it. You are stating the rule you are about to apply, and nothing else earns its place. If the issue is whether a duty was owed, you need the test for duty, not the history of the tort.

Cite the source properly: the section of the statute, the case and the proposition it stands for, the article of the treaty. Where the law is contested, say so and say how, because a rule with a genuine disagreement inside it is usually the reason the question was set. Where a case is authority for your proposition, give the proposition rather than the facts. Reciting the facts of a decided case is not a statement of law, and it consumes the space your application needs.

Application

This is the answer. Everything before it is preparation, and everything after it is arithmetic.

Application means taking the rule you have just stated and running it against the facts you have been given, one element at a time, saying for each whether it is satisfied and why. The word ‘why’ is doing the work. ‘The defendant owed a duty’ asserts. ‘The defendant owed a duty because the relationship falls within the category recognised in X, the claimant being in the class of persons the rule protects’ argues.

Three things separate a strong application from a competent one.

• Use the facts you were given. Quote them. If the question says the letter arrived on a Tuesday, and Tuesday matters, say Tuesday. Facts in a problem question are not scenery.
• Argue both ways where the facts are genuinely balanced. Set out the stronger case, then the counter-argument, then say which prevails and why. An examiner cannot award marks for judgement you do not show.
• Do not decide what you have not argued. If you never addressed causation, you cannot conclude on liability.

Conclusion

State the answer to the question you asked in the Issue, on the argument you actually made.

A conclusion introduces nothing. If a point appears for the first time here, it belongs in Application and you have run out of room because something earlier was too long. Where the answer is genuinely uncertain, say which way it is likely to go and on what basis; ‘it depends’ without a lean is not a conclusion, it is a refusal. Where there are several issues, conclude on each, then say what the combined answer means for the parties, which is usually what a client would have asked in the first place.

A worked example

The statute is invented so that nothing here turns on remembering real doctrine.

Section 3 of the (fictional) Public Spaces Act provides: ‘A person who, without reasonable excuse, obstructs a public footpath commits an offence.’ M parks a van across a footpath for twenty minutes while unloading medical supplies for a neighbouring clinic. She is charged under section 3.

Issue. Whether unloading medical supplies for a clinic constitutes a reasonable excuse for obstructing a public footpath under section 3.

Law. Section 3 creates an offence with two elements: obstruction of a public footpath, and the absence of a reasonable excuse. The first is a question of fact. The second is an objective standard, which asks not whether the defendant believed her reason good but whether a reasonable person would regard it as sufficient in the circumstances.

Application. Obstruction is not seriously in dispute: a van across the width of a footpath prevents passage, and twenty minutes is not so brief as to be de minimis. The question is the excuse. In favour of M, the purpose was the delivery of medical supplies, the obstruction was temporary, and it was incidental to an activity the footpath’s neighbours benefit from. Against her, section 3 contains no delivery exemption, twenty minutes is long enough that an alternative could have been sought, and no evidence suggests the supplies were urgent or that another access point was unavailable. The objective standard is likely to be met if the delivery could not reasonably have been made otherwise, and not met if it could. On the facts as given, which say nothing about alternatives, the stronger reading is that the excuse succeeds only if M can show the obstruction was necessary rather than merely convenient.

Conclusion. M has obstructed the footpath. Whether she commits the offence turns on the availability of an alternative means of delivery, on which the facts are silent. On the facts as stated her excuse is arguable but not established, and the burden of showing it will be hers.

The failures that cost the most marks

• Answering the topic instead of the question. Everything known about the area, in no particular order, addressed to nobody.
• Law without application. A correct statement of the rule followed by a conclusion, with the argument missing. This is the single most common failure and it is invisible to the writer, because the reasoning happened in their head.
• Application without law. Confident argument about fairness, untethered to a rule.
• Burying the issue. Three paragraphs of context before the question appears.
• Running out of room. Almost always caused by an over-long Law section. Budget by marks: if application is where the marks are, it should be where the words are.

Why the structure survives the exam

ILAC is not a student’s device. It is the shape of a legal argument, and it is what an advice note, a written submission and a judgment all do underneath their own conventions. A memorandum states the question, sets out the governing law, applies it to the client’s facts and advises. A judgment identifies the issue, states the law, applies it and disposes. Learning to separate the four moves is not preparation for an examination. It is the beginning of the way lawyers write.