Legal Reasoning: Applying a Given Principle to Given Facts
AILET's Legal Reasoning items are principle-and-fact puzzles. You are given a legal principle - often drawn from contract, tort, criminal law or constitutional law - and a short set of facts, and asked which conclusion follows. You are not expected to have memorised statutes; you are expected to apply the stated rule exactly, the way a judge would.
Method
- Parse the principle into its elements - for negligence: duty, breach, causation, damage.
- Tag each fact to an element; discard facts that fit no element.
- Apply only the principle supplied, even when your own sense of fairness disagrees.
- Choose the option that follows necessarily, not the one that sounds most reasonable.
Doctrines that recur
- Negligence: duty of care, breach, causation, damage.
- Contract: offer versus invitation to offer, consideration, free consent, void versus voidable.
- Vicarious liability: a master is liable for a servant's acts done in the course of employment.
- Strict liability: liability without proof of negligence.
Worked example
Principle: A person who keeps a wild animal is strictly liable for any harm it causes, even if reasonable care was taken. Facts: A keeps a tiger in a locked enclosure; the tiger escapes and injures B. Conclusion: A is liable. The principle makes care irrelevant; escape plus injury completes the rule. Note that under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (which replaced the IPC), the same element-based reading applies to criminal-law principles.
Traps that cost marks
- Adding facts the question never supplied.
- Choosing 'not liable' because the defendant acted carefully - that matters for negligence, not strict liability.
- Confusing criminal guilt with civil liability; the standards differ.