Crafting A Compelling Thesis and Narrative Structure
How to Outline a Law Review Article (Part 2 of 6)
Legal scholarship is both art and science, a delicate balance between rigorous analysis and compelling narrative.
In our first installment of this series, we explored the process of topic selection and preliminary research for law review articles, laying the groundwork for meaningful scholarly contribution. We discussed how to identify gaps in legal literature, evaluate topic viability, and begin the research process with intention and focus.
Now, we turn to what many scholars consider the most crucial stage of article development: crafting a compelling thesis statement and designing a structural roadmap.
As we saw with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s groundbreaking work on intersectionality, a powerful thesis can transform legal thought across multiple fields. What began as her observation about courts treating race and gender discrimination as separate issues evolved into a conceptual framework that has influenced everything from constitutional interpretation to critical race theory. The strength of her thesis—that antidiscrimination law fails to address the unique forms of subordination faced by those at the intersection of multiple identity categories—provided the intellectual foundation for decades of subsequent scholarship.
But how do we develop a thesis statement with this kind of clarity and potential impact? And once we have a thesis, how do we structure our articles to maximize their persuasive power?
In this second installment, we’ll explore techniques for refining your initial topic into a precise, arguable thesis statement and developing a narrative structure that guides readers through your argument. In developing your thesis and roadmap, you’re not just organizing information. You’re creating an intellectual journey for your readers that will guide them from problem to solution, from status quo to new possibility.
Let’s dive in!
The Foundations of Academic Well-Being
Before diving into thesis development, it’s worth acknowledging the psychological dimension of scholarly writing. During check-ins with my law students in both my doctrinal classes and smaller seminars, a pattern often emerges: those who implement intentional work strategies consistently make better progress.
Time-blocking has emerged as one of the most effective techniques for academic writers. By designating specific periods solely for writing—free from email, social media, and other distractions—scholars create the mental space necessary for deep work. I recommend Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, on this topic.
Additionally, the Pomodoro Technique, which alternates 25-minute focused work sessions with short breaks, has proven particularly effective for many scholars, who require both sustained concentration and periodic perspective shifts. The American Bar Association’s article Top Ten Time Management Strategies for Attorneys recommends time-blocking combined with the Eisenhower Matrix as an effective tool for prioritization.
This approach—allocating specific time blocks to tasks based on urgency and importance—is just as applicable to legal scholars, helping to manage workload more efficiently and reduce cognitive overload in research and writing.
Crafting a Thesis That Matters
The thesis is the intellectual backbone of your article—the central claim around which everything else orbits. Yet, many promising law review submissions falter because their theses lack precision, originality, or significance.
What Makes a Thesis Effective?
An effective legal thesis generally contains three essential elements:
Specificity: It addresses a clearly defined legal question or problem rather than a broad topic.
Arguability: It takes a position that reasonable minds could debate rather than stating an obvious truth.
Significance: It explores why the argument matters and to whom.
Consider these contrasting examples:
Weak thesis: “Corporate governance laws need reform.”
Strong(er) thesis: “SB 21 represents a quintessential reformist reform—tweaking governance rules while maintaining managerial control without addressing structural inequities in corporate governance. True corporate accountability requires moving beyond incremental changes to fundamentally reconstruct corporate governance, drawing inspiration from American labor’s history of direct action against unjust economic structures.”
The first example lacks specificity and argumentative stance. The second begins to identify a precise legal development (SB 21), frames it within a specific analytical framework (reformist vs. non-reformist reforms), proposes a particular perspective on what meaningful change would require (structural change), and connects to broader historical context that establishes its significance (labor history).
The Power of Positionality
Legal scholarship does not emerge in isolation. Every scholar writes from a particular vantage point, shaped by personal experiences, professional training, institutional affiliations, and community ties. These influences are not distractions from objectivity—they are part of what gives legal analysis its depth and relevance.
As the field of legal scholarship has evolved, the ideal of the detached, purely objective legal analyst has been increasingly questioned. It is now broadly acknowledged that all legal interpretation arises from somewhere—from a set of values, assumptions, and lived experiences. The critical question is not whether our perspective influences our work (it always does), but whether we are honest and reflective enough to name that perspective, rather than hide behind a veneer of neutrality.
Far from weakening an argument, acknowledging your positionality can enrich your scholarship. It allows you to situate your analysis in context, clarify your stakes in the debate, and anticipate how your views might differ from others. This reflective approach not only enhances credibility, it models intellectual integrity.
As you develop your thesis, consider the following questions to help surface and engage your positionality:
What personal or professional experiences have shaped my interest in this topic?
How might my background influence the way I frame the problem or define key terms?
Are there voices or perspectives I might unintentionally overlook?
How can naming my standpoint help clarify the values or assumptions that underlie my argument?
By bringing your full self into your scholarship—with transparency and intentionality—you join a long tradition of legal thinkers who see the law not as abstract doctrine, but as a living system shaped by human choices, commitments, and struggles.
Before we go further, a quick reality check:
If you’ve ever felt like your career is being weighed down by setbacks or failures, you’re not alone. But the failures we face—rejected publications, tough evaluations, or unfulfilled expectations—are not the end of the road. They are opportunities to find deeper purpose and resilience in our work.
At The Tenure Track, we help you transform these challenges into opportunities. We focus on more than just research and writing. We help you build a foundation that ensures your scholarship is meaningful, impactful, and engaged with.
Ready to turn struggle into purpose? Subscribe to The Tenure Track for strategies to grow your scholarship, expand your network, and make a lasting impact.
Structuring Your Argument: Motro’s Three-Act Approach
Effective legal scholarship often follows the narrative patterns of good storytelling, turning complex analysis into a compelling, intellectually engaging journey.
In her article, The Three-Act Argument: How to Write a Law Article That Reads Like a Good Story, Shari Motro offers a powerful framework for structuring your law review article as a narrative. This structure not only keeps readers engaged but also helps to clarify your argument and make it more persuasive.
Act I: The Status Quo and its Rationale (“The Villain’s Day in the Sun”)
The first act of your law review article introduces the existing legal framework—the doctrine, practice, or principle that your analysis will ultimately challenge. This section is crucial for establishing your credibility as a scholar who has reviewed the relevant literature on your topic.
By presenting the current state of affairs accurately and fairly, you demonstrate intellectual honesty and a thorough understanding of the subject matter before proposing alternatives.
In this section, you should:
Describe the status quo clearly and accurately: Provide a comprehensive explanation of the existing legal framework, ensuring that readers understand the current state of affairs.
Present the strongest rationales supporting the current legal approach: Acknowledge the reasons why the existing framework has been adopted and maintained, including legal precedents, policy considerations, and institutional practices.
Acknowledge the historical, social, or institutional context that has shaped this practice: Recognize the factors that have influenced the development and persistence of the current framework.
Resist the temptation to immediately critique or undermine these rationales: Present the existing framework in its strongest form before introducing your critique, allowing for a fair and balanced analysis.
According to Motro, this section typically includes subsections such as:
A. The Status Quo Described: Provide a thorough and unbiased explanation of the current legal framework.
B. Rationales for the Status Quo: Present the most compelling arguments for maintaining the current approach, which may include:
Rationale 1: Often grounded in precedent, tradition, or institutional concerns.
Rationale 2: Addressing practical considerations or policy goals that justify the status quo.
By carefully constructing this section, you lay a solid foundation for the subsequent analysis and ensure that your critique is informed and well-reasoned.
Act II: Argument (“Battle of the Titans”)
In the second act, the narrative takes a turn as you introduce conflict into your analysis. After fairly presenting the status quo, you now begin to highlight its flaws, contradictions, or limitations.
This section is where you engage in the intellectual “battle” of your article, challenging the existing framework and opening space for your proposed solutions. The “Battle of the Titans” metaphor, introduced by Shari Motro, captures this stage, as competing ideas clash and expose the weaknesses of the current approach.
In this act, your goal is to:
Identify specific weaknesses or contradictions within the status quo: Point out where the current legal framework falls short or fails to address emerging issues. This might involve identifying contradictions in the law’s application, inconsistencies in its reasoning, or gaps that leave key questions unanswered.
Introduce alternative theoretical frameworks that challenge existing assumptions: Present other schools of thought, legal theories, or perspectives that challenge the conventional wisdom and offer new ways of understanding the issue at hand.
Present empirical evidence that complicates or undermines accepted wisdom: Use data, case studies, or real-world examples to highlight how the status quo fails to achieve its intended outcomes or doesn’t reflect the lived experiences of those affected by it.
Develop sub-arguments that gradually build toward your ultimate proposal: Break down your critique into manageable pieces, each addressing a different facet of the status quo. These sub-arguments should work together to reveal the need for change and prepare the ground for your alternative proposal.
This section often contains multiple subsections, each dedicated to a different aspect of the status quo. These subsections systematically dismantle the current framework while presenting the intellectual groundwork for your own perspective.
By carefully deconstructing the existing approach, you show why it is inadequate and set the stage for your proposed solution. This act transforms your article from a mere critique into an intellectual exploration of new possibilities.
Act III: Proposal (“Hero Dreams Big”)
The third and final act of your article is where you fulfill the promise made in the opening. Having laid out the flaws and limitations of the status quo, this act introduces your proposed solution.
As Shari Motro suggests, this is where the “hero” emerges—not only critiquing the existing framework but offering a concrete and viable alternative.
Your proposal should:
Clearly articulate a specific solution or alternative approach: Be precise about what you are suggesting as a replacement for or improvement to the current legal framework. Your solution should be focused, actionable, and grounded in the analysis you’ve developed throughout the article.
Explain how your proposal addresses the flaws identified in Act II: Connect your proposal directly to the problems you uncovered in the second act. Demonstrate how your solution resolves the issues, fills gaps, or corrects the contradictions within the current system.
Anticipate potential counterarguments and respond to them thoughtfully: Acknowledge and engage with critiques that might be raised against your proposal. This not only strengthens your argument by showing you’ve considered different viewpoints, but it also demonstrates that you are thinking critically about the practicality and limitations of your own solution.
Consider the practical challenges of implementing your solution and explore possibilities for overcoming them: While your proposal may be theoretically sound, it’s important to consider the real-world implications. Address potential obstacles to implementation—such as political, institutional, or logistical challenges—and offer insights on how these challenges might be overcome.
This final act ensures that your article doesn’t just critique the existing framework but offers a meaningful contribution to the conversation. Rather than simply identifying problems, you guide your readers to pathways forward, helping them envision how your solution could be realized and why it matters.
By thoughtfully presenting your proposal, you leave readers with not just questions, but actionable insights and a clearer understanding of how the law could evolve. This is where your article shifts from analysis to advocacy, offering concrete steps toward improvement.
Visual Mapping of Motro’s Three-Act Structure
Creating a visual representation of your article’s three-act structure can help you identify gaps, imbalances, or areas where the argument needs further development. By visually mapping out the narrative flow, you can ensure that your article stays focused and that each section serves the overall thesis.
For example, you might sketch a diagram (or a 1 page summary) that outlines the key components of each act:
Introduction: Establishes the problem, introduces your thesis, and outlines the importance of your analysis.
Act I: Status Quo: This section will include subsections such as:
Status Quo Described: A detailed explanation of the current legal framework.
Rationales for the Status Quo: The arguments supporting the existing approach.
Act II: Critique: Here, your diagram should include subsections such as:
Limitations of the Status Quo: Identifying flaws, contradictions, or weaknesses in the existing framework.
Alternative Theories and Empirical Evidence: Introducing other perspectives or evidence that challenge the current approach.
Act III: Proposal: This section should be broken down into subsections such as:
Your Proposed Solution: Clearly articulating your alternative approach.
Addressing Counterarguments: Responding to potential criticisms of your proposal.
Implementation Considerations: Discussing practical challenges and strategies for overcoming them.
Conclusion: A section dedicated to synthesizing the key insights of your article and discussing the broader implications of your proposal.
Creating a visual representation helps you track how well each section flows and whether the structure is logically cohesive. It ensures that your article stays aligned with Motro’s three-act framework, helping you maintain a clear narrative arc from beginning to end.
This mapping tool is particularly helpful in guiding the reader through your analysis, ensuring that each part of the article supports and builds upon the others.
Stakeholder Analysis: Who Has Skin in the Game?
Legal scholarship that overlooks real-world implications risks missing the mark in terms of relevance and impact.
To ensure your analysis remains grounded and meaningful, it’s essential to identify and map the stakeholders affected by the legal issue you’re exploring. By doing so, you demonstrate an awareness of the broader consequences of your work and make sure it resonates with the practical realities of the legal landscape.
Integrating stakeholder analysis into Shari Motro’s three-act structure can be particularly effective in strengthening your argument and adding depth to your analysis. Here’s how you can incorporate it into each act:
In Act I: Status Quo: Identify the stakeholders who benefit from or are protected by the current legal framework. This might include individuals, organizations, or institutions that maintain the status quo for personal, financial, or institutional reasons.
In Act II: Critique: Highlight the stakeholders whose interests are inadequately served or even harmed by the existing approach. This allows you to emphasize the gaps and contradictions in the status quo, demonstrating why change is necessary.
In Act III: Proposal: Show how your proposed solution better balances the interests of diverse stakeholders. Illustrate how your alternative approach addresses the needs of those who have been overlooked or negatively impacted by the current system, while also considering the needs of those who benefit from it.
A comprehensive stakeholder analysis involves considering the following categories:
Primary Stakeholders: Those who are directly impacted by the legal issue. These might include litigants, regulated entities, or those immediately affected by the law.
Secondary Stakeholders: Groups who are indirectly impacted by the issue, such as industries, advocacy groups, disempowered participants, or communities that experience ripple effects from the legal framework.
Institutional Stakeholders: Courts, agencies, and legislatures that influence or are responsible for shaping the legal landscape and policy decisions.
Outlier Stakeholders: Groups whose interests are often overlooked in traditional legal analysis, such as marginalized communities or less-visible parties affected by the law (such as workers in the corporate context).
When creating your stakeholder map, consider using physical or digital visualization tools. These tools can help you identify and analyze relationships between different stakeholders, uncovering tensions, alignments, and power dynamics that may influence the legal issue.
By mapping these relationships, you can better address the complexity of the issue and ensure that your argument reflects the nuanced reality of the situation. This added layer of analysis makes your article more robust, relevant, and grounded in the practical world of law.
Case Study: Applying the Framework to “Breaking the Machine”
Since I’m not just trying to preach to the choir but also take my own advice, here’s an article I’m working on that puts these ideas into practice.
In this section, I examine how my new idea, Breaking the Machine: Toward Non-Reformist Corporate Governance Reform, engages the three-act structure from Shari Motro’s framework, while also reflecting key principles we’ve discussed (clear thesis development, coherent argument structure, and a grounded integration of real-world concerns).
Thesis Development in the Case Study
The working thesis for “Breaking the Machine” demonstrates the core principles of specificity, arguability, and significance:
“SB 21 is a quintessential reformist reform—tweaking governance rules while maintaining managerial control. True corporate accountability requires moving beyond reformist reforms and ‘breaking the machine’ to reconstruct corporate governance, drawing inspiration from American labor’s history of direct action against unjust economic structures.”
This working thesis fulfills several important functions:
Identifies a specific legal issue: The thesis directly addresses SB 21’s approach to corporate governance reform, focusing on a particular legislative proposal and its shortcomings.
Takes a debatable position: The characterization of SB 21 as a “reformist reform” that doesn’t go far enough invites debate, creating room for counterarguments and scholarly engagement.
Suggests broader significance: The thesis goes beyond legal doctrine to connect corporate governance to larger societal issues of economic justice, aligning legal theory with real-world struggles for equity.
This approach also integrates a guiding metaphor—“breaking the machine”—which serves as a unifying theme for the article. This metaphor connects historical labor resistance movements to contemporary debates on corporate governance, illustrating the ongoing tensions between managerial control and worker empowerment across U.S. history. Further, it helps to make an abstract legal concept more relatable and memorable, providing a lens through which the article’s arguments are framed and understood.
The working thesis of “Breaking the Machine” also builds on concepts introduced in my forthcoming law review article in the UC Irvine Law Review, The Engine of Racial Capitalism. The Engine of Racial Capitalism introduces a novel framework for understanding how corporate governance sustains racial capitalism through the metaphor of a four-stroke engine. Now, Breaking the Machine will continue this theme to critique modern corporate governance reforms. Both pieces engage with the tension between corporate governance structures and the exploitation of marginalized labor, but Breaking the Machine narrows in on recent legislative reform efforts, like SB 21, to challenge their superficiality.
By extending the ideas from The Engine of Racial Capitalism into Breaking the Machine, this work draws a direct connection between corporate governance and labor history, furthering the conversation (i.e., my research agenda) on how legal structures both reflect and perpetuate systemic inequality. This connection enriches the ongoing analysis by pushing for a more radical reimagination of corporate governance, one that goes beyond incremental reforms and dismantles the systems that maintain racial and economic inequities.
By focusing on this approach to thesis development, legal scholars can craft arguments that not only challenge existing frameworks but also push for meaningful change within those frameworks, contributing to the ongoing conversation on reform and justice.
Applying Motro’s Three-Act Structure to My Work
This high-level version of my law article’s working outline demonstrates how I am exploring the three-act framework in my analysis of corporate governance reform, with a clear distinction between “reformist reforms” and “non-reformist reforms.”
Act I: The Status Quo and Its Rationale (“The Machine at Work”)
The article begins by describing the current corporate governance system using the framework I developed in my prior article, which is encapsulated in the “four-stroke engine” metaphor. This metaphor explains the four key stages of corporate governance:
Who gets in (Intake Stage)
Who holds power (Compression Stage)
Who benefits (Combustion Stage)
Who bears costs (Exhaust Stage)
True to Motro’s concept of giving “the villain its day in court,” this section includes a discussion of “Rationales for the Status Quo,” presenting fair and intellectual arguments for the current arrangements:
Managerial flexibility and corporate efficiency
Delaware’s competitive advantage
By acknowledging the strongest arguments for the current system, the article demonstrates intellectual honesty in engaging with the status quo it ultimately challenges.
Act II: Argument (“Tuning the Engine or Breaking It?”)
In this section, the article creates the “Battle of the Titans” by showing how SB 21 represents a “reformist reform”—it tweaks governance rules without fundamentally challenging or dismantling the entrenched structures of corporate power that harm workers and marginalized communities.
The outline analyzes the limitations of SB 21 through the four stages of the engine metaphor:
How it exploits workers and communities
How it consolidates corporate power
How it suppresses worker representation
How it weakens accountability
The article argues that SB 21, while attempting to address corporate governance issues, ultimately does not challenge the underlying capitalist structures. It merely “tunes” the engine, without dismantling or reconfiguring it in a meaningful way.
The section then draws connections to historical labor resistance, showing how modern reformist approaches mirror past insufficient reforms that failed to meaningfully address the structural issues at play.
Act III: Proposal (“Breaking the Machine”)
The final section delivers on Motro’s “Hero Dreams Big” by presenting concrete alternatives to the reformist corporate governance strategies exemplified by SB 21—these are “non-reformist reforms” that aim to fundamentally reconstruct corporate governance. These proposals include:
Worker representation on boards
Mandatory public interest obligations
Revamped corporate voting rights
Expanded rather than restricted shareholder power
Workplace democracy mechanisms
These non-reformist reforms don’t merely critique SB 21 but offer a comprehensive vision for transforming corporate governance based on principles of economic democracy. The goal is to dismantle the entrenched capitalist structures that perpetuate racial capitalism, providing a path toward a more equitable and accountable corporate system.
From Theory to Practice: Crafting Your Working Thesis
As you prepare your working thesis, remember that it will evolve as your research deepens. The hallmark of a strong working thesis is that it’s specific enough to guide research but flexible enough to accommodate new insights.
Your thesis statement should accomplish several goals:
Identify the legal problem you’re addressing
Signal your analytical approach
Suggest your proposed resolution
Imply the significance of your contribution
When designing your thesis using Motro’s framework, consider structuring it to reflect all three acts:
“Although [status quo] has been justified by [rationales], it fails to account for [critique], necessitating [proposal].”
This formulation ensures your thesis contains the seeds of your entire three-act narrative.
Conclusion: The Roadmap as Scholarly Promise
The thesis and roadmap you develop aren’t merely organizational tools. They represent a promise to your readers about the intellectual journey ahead. By carefully crafting these elements using Motro’s three-act structure, you establish both what your article will argue and how that argument will unfold.
Motro’s framework transforms legal scholarship from static analysis to dynamic narrative. When readers encounter your work, they won’t just absorb information. They’ll experience an intellectual journey with tension, resolution, and insight.
In our next installment of this series, we’ll dive into Act I of your article, focusing on how to frame the legal problem and map its broader significance. We’ll explore strategies for identifying multiple analytical perspectives, incorporating critical approaches, and outlining the structure of your initial argument.
Writing Assignment:
Draft a working thesis for your law review article that incorporates the elements we’ve discussed and reflects Motro’s three-act structure.
Craft a one-paragraph problem statement that establishes the context and importance of the issue your article will address, framing it as the “status quo” that your article will ultimately challenge.
Remember that these are working drafts that will evolve as your project develops. The goal at this stage is clarity of purpose rather than perfection of expression.
Experimentation is part of the process.
Becoming Full,
P.S. As always, thank you for reading this week’s issue of The Tenure Track. If you found this article helpful, I encourage you to share it with a colleague or friend who might benefit from these insights. Together, let’s continue to build a supportive and creative academic community.