Legal Aptitude – the pattern

Today, legal aptitude is a significantly essential section of all law entrance examinations in India. Talking about Common Law Admission Test (“CLAT”), legal aptitude carries 50 marks out of the 200 and becomes a significant factor in deciding tie-breaking. For the purposes of this article, let’s take a deep look at the areas of law, kind of questions they like to test and the ideal approach to address them.

 Areas of law:

All law entrance exams in India test principally four subjects in legal aptitude, i.e. Constitutional Law, Criminal Law (“IPC”), Law of Tort (“tort”) and Law of Contract (“contract”). The three areas, i.e. IPC, tort and contract mostly carry equal weight age in the number of questions. To understand it better, let’s take a look at the kind of questions they like to test.

Kind of questions they test?

Most exams today, by one way or the other, test legal aptitude questions in two forms. One – they test theoretical questions testing prior legal knowledge and the other in which you must solve a given set of problem. The good thing is that all these questions, in fact the whole test carries only multiple / objective questions with four choices out of which you must choose one.

Questions testing prior legal knowledge:

These questions encompass all the above four areas of law where Constitution requires a special mention. In this area, while you will face questions on all four, i.e. Constitution, IPC, tort and contract. However, maximum of such questions that you will encounter will be based on constitution. The rationale is rather simple, i.e. it is difficult to find and/or form problem solving questions based on constitution. That being said, you will face a far lesser number of problem solving questions based on constitution.

It is pertinent to mention CLAT here whose administrators claim that they will not test these questions. However, the recent trend has shown that they do not keep themselves from testing these questions in the sections of legal aptitude and/or general knowledge under the veil of legal GK.

That takes us to the second type of questions, i.e. problem solving questions that you will have to practice and will be tested upon.

   Problem solving questions

As said earlier, these questions are the second type that gets tested in legal aptitude section of all of the law entrance exams in India.

These questions typically contain a rule or a set of rules of law and a fact or a set of facts. Candidates are required to apply the rule(s) to the fact(s) and choose the “best” answer.

What do we mean by “best answer”? How to approach and solve these questions? 

We will answer all these questions and more in our next blog. Stay tuned. In the meantime, can we ask you to comment on our Face Book post or here (on our website) and tell us how you like this article and blog in general? We promise to be back with the next part very soon.

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