When Knowing the Legal Term Is Not Enough

I have always found it interesting that students can appear to have understood something very well until they are asked to use it in a situation that is slightly different from the one they discussed in class. This became particularly noticeable to me while teaching Legal English to first-year law students and working with common-law defences, where we had discussed necessity, consent, self-defence, duress and public duty. They could explain the terminology and answer questions about the definitions, so I assumed that the concepts had been understood.

The situation that made me reconsider this assumption involved a doctor treating an unconscious patient following a serious accident. The patient could not give consent and the doctor provided life-saving treatment. I asked which legal defence applied. Although 91 per cent were able to identify the definition of public duty, only 60 per cent selected public duty when applying the concept to the medical situation; 27 per cent chose necessity and 13 per cent chose consent.

At first, I interpreted this as a problem of knowledge application. However, when I looked more carefully at the answers, I realised that the students were not simply guessing. Their choices were connected to particular facts they had noticed. The doctor had to act quickly and the patient’s life was in danger, so necessity seemed reasonable from their perspective. Those who selected consent were also responding to something genuinely present in the situation, since the patient had not given consent. The error was therefore more revealing: the students were trying to connect the legal concepts they had learned with the facts of the case, but were not yet consistently identifying which facts were legally decisive.

From terminology to the situation

After this experience, I started paying more attention to what happens before I ask students for the legal answer. Instead of immediately asking, “Which defence applies?”, I sometimes ask what they notice first and which elements of the situation they consider significant. Students identify the facts: the patient is unconscious, the situation is an emergency, the person acting is a doctor, the patient cannot give consent and treatment is necessary. I then ask which facts might matter from a legal perspective and why.

I also find it useful to ask students to explain an answer that I know is not the best one rather than correcting it immediately. If a student chooses necessity, I ask what led them to that conclusion. If the answer is that the doctor had to save the patient’s life, we have a starting point for discussion rather than a wrong answer to be corrected. Another student may notice the doctor’s professional role, while someone else may return to consent. Gradually, the class begins to see that several concepts can appear relevant, but the task is to establish which is most appropriate in relation to the facts and the legal relationship involved.

I have also found it useful to change one detail in a case and ask whether the interpretation would change. I might make the patient conscious and refusing treatment, or change the person providing assistance from a doctor to an ordinary passer-by. Students soon discover that one small difference can alter the interpretation: the professional role matters, as do the patient’s ability to give consent and the circumstances surrounding the action. Students begin to identify these relationships themselves rather than waiting for me to point them out.

What the experience changed for me

The experience made me think more carefully about what we actually mean when we say that a student “knows” a legal term. If a student can give the correct definition of public duty, I can reasonably say that the term has been learned at one level. However, if the same student cannot recognise the concept in a new situation, or cannot explain why it is more appropriate than a related concept, then another stage of learning still needs to take place.

This is one of the difficulties of Legal English as an ESP subject. Students are not simply acquiring specialised vocabulary; they are becoming familiar with how that vocabulary functions within professional discourse and with the contexts in which it will eventually be used. Northcott (2008) emphasises the importance of learner context, methodology and teacher background in English for Legal Purposes. In law, this means giving students opportunities not only to learn terminology but also to work with the relationships between language, facts, professional roles and legal reasoning.

My recent classroom study showed the same pattern: students performed very well when dealing with theoretical definitions, but their performance changed when they encountered ambiguous, applied scenarios. The findings made me realise that the space between knowing a term and using it is precisely where much of the learning still has to happen (Prodanovska-Poposka 2026).

Definitions are not unimportant; on the contrary, they are necessary, particularly when students are learning a specialised field in a foreign language. What I have changed is what I do after the definitions have been taught. I now want students to encounter the terminology again in situations where they have to interpret information, make a decision and explain the reasoning behind it, because this gives me a better indication of whether they can actually use the concept rather than simply recognise it.

This is one of the more interesting aspects of teaching Legal English, and perhaps of English for Specific Purposes more generally. Students are learning the language of law, but they are also learning how that language operates within a professional context, where the meaning and relevance of a term may depend on the facts of a particular situation. The challenge is to help them recognise when a term matters, what it means in context, and why it is more appropriate than another possibility.

That is perhaps the question I now ask myself more often when preparing a Legal English lesson: not only, “Will my students know this term?”, but also, “What will they be able to do with it when I give them a case?”

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References

Northcott, J. 2008. ‘Language education for law professionals’. In J. Gibbons and M. Turell (eds.), Dimensions of Forensic Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 27–46.

Prodanovska-Poposka, V. 2026. ‘Between theory and practice: A post-lecture analysis of common-law defences’. Palimpsest 11/21: 177–85.

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