The Art of Footnotes
Footnotes can be boring. Writing them even more than reading them. Still, they form the backbone of a good law essay, let alone of a good law article or book.
What is their purpose? Firstly, they are there for you to “park” your citations. The hospitable bosom of these small footnotes will happily accept anything from R v Brown to Factortame and Francovich. It will groan if you only cite primary sources (statutes, case law etc.), and it will scowl if you only cite secondary sources (books, articles etc.). Thus, a balanced mix is imperative.
Secondly, footnotes are there for you to laconically go on an excursus. You should not fill them with paragraphs upon paragraphs of comments in a vain effort to circumvent the word count for your essay, given that footnotes do not usually count. No. You must resist this urge. Footnotes are there for you to clarify your arguments or further explain certain points that would break the flow of your essay and/or are not important enough to make it to the body of your essay . Use them for this reason and this reason alone.
Thirdly, footnotes are important for law students' essays because they are very frequently relied upon by law professors s a first indication of the quality of a law essay (oh yes). This might come as a surprise to some of you but, in my experience and opinion, footnotes are one of the most accurate ways of forming an initial view on the quality of a student's law essay. This is so for multiple reasons. Firstly, your footnotes reveal the breadth of your reading and the depth of your research. Secondly, it shows your law lecturer whether you have actually read the reading assigned by them in the reading list, thus illustrating that you can follow instructions and that you have gone through the reading list diligently. Thirdly, the footnotes will demonstrate to what an extent you have avoided repetition; if all the reader sees is “ibid”, “ibid” and... “ibid”, then the variety of your sources is most probably not ideal.
To sum up, your footnotes say more about your work than you may have previously imagined. Therefore, it is worth reassessing your strategy and paying more attention to the neglected art of footnoting.
Best of luck with your writing!