OCR and AQA alignedFirst & Master's in LawInstant download
🔥 Must-Know Top 5 Cases
R v Pittwood [1902] — duty by contract
R v Smith [1959] — operating & substantial cause
R v Cunningham [1957] — subjective recklessness
R v Woollin [1998] — oblique intention
R v Latimer [1886] — transferred malice
❌ Common Mistake
Confusing intention with motive. Motive is why someone did it. Intention is whether they meant to. Examiners deduct marks for treating them as the same thing.
✅ Spec Check — OCR H418/01 & AQA
Covers every spec point: actus reus, mens rea, causation, strict liability, transferred malice, coincidence. Nothing skipped — checked against both OCR and AQA specifications.
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Subjects live
17
Topics live
104
Key cases
1,000+
Hours of tutoring
The problem
Free resources skip the bits examiners reward.
You can spend a term reading textbooks, watching YouTube, downloading PDFs from forums — and still walk into the exam without the one thing that separates Level 4 from Level 3: knowing exactly what OCR awards marks for, in the language they expect to see.
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Generic notes that aren't OCR or AQA-specific. Half the cases aren't on your spec.
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Cases listed without exam-ready application — you know R v Smith, but not how to use it in a 20-marker.
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No guidance on what gets you Level 4 — just "structure your answer" with no real anatomy.
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Private A-Level Law tutors charge £30–60/hour. Most students can't afford that — even if they need it.
What you get
Every topic, fully built.
Each topic is a complete self-contained resource. Notes, cases, practice questions, AO3 evaluation, exam technique — built to hand to a student who needs everything in one place.
Two-minute summary. Full legal version. Worked examples on every spec point. Cross-checked against OCR and AQA specifications, examiner reports and past papers.
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Case law bank
53 named cases in Topic 1, audit-checked. 104 across the full case index.
Facts. Principle. Element. "Use it in an exam." Star-rated by examiner-frequency. Trophy badge on cases that have appeared in OCR mark schemes.
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Practice questions
22 across 5 difficulty tiers.
Bronze (recall) → Silver (8-mark Section A) → Gold (20-mark Section B) → Stretch → Past Paper. Every model answer written for OCR and AQA mark schemes.
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Exam skills
The anatomy of a Level 4 answer.
IRAC template. Annotated model answers. Mark-scheme language. The five things every Level 4 response does that a Level 3 doesn't.
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AO3 evaluation bank
10 model evaluation paragraphs.
The reform debates examiners actually reward — strict liability, transferred malice, the doctrine of coincidence. Ready to lift into your essays.
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Diagrams & mnemonics
Built for memory.
Causation flowchart. Mind map of the whole topic. Five mnemonics (PaT-SO-PRO, BOSI, V-T-N, others) — the ones my own tutees actually remember.
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RAG confidence tracker
Saves automatically.
Mark every spec point Red, Amber or Green. Comes back next time you open the file. Tells you exactly what to revise next.
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Last-minute revision
Exam-morning ready.
Top-5 cases per element. The one-page summary. The night-before checklist. Open this on the train, close it, walk in.
Lak
Working in law · A-Level & AS-Level Law tutor Founder, LawByLak
"I teach this every week. I know what gets students to A/A* because I've watched students get there."
Who builds this
Built by someone who teaches this every week.
LawByLak isn't another peer-shared notes site or a generic revision platform. Every topic is checked against the real OCR and AQA specifications, examiner reports and past papers — written by someone who teaches A-Level and AS-Level Law to real students every week and works inside legal practice every day.
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First-Class Law degree and a Master's in Law — qualified at university level in the subject I'm now teaching.
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1,000+ hours of tutoring delivered, with A-Level & AS-Level Law as my specialism — same OCR (H418, H018) and AQA mistakes, same fixes, week after week.
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Currently working inside legal practice; qualifying soon. Cases verified, mark-scheme language used, examiner reports referenced.
Audit-corrected Paper 1 explainers — written exactly like the inside of our PDFs, free for anyone preparing for OCR and AQA. Tort (Paper 2) coverage is now live in the modules.
The same rhythm I run with my tutees. Read once properly, drill until it sticks, then refine your weak areas every week until you sit down in the exam hall.
01
Read & understand
~90 minutes per topic.
Two-minute summary first. Then the full legal version. Don't memorise yet — just understand. Every concept has a worked example before you're asked to recall it.
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Practise & apply
~45 minutes per topic.
Bronze first (recall and 8-mark Explains). Silver and Gold next (the 20-mark scenarios). Self-mark. Read the model. Repeat the question you got wrong.
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Revise & refine
~20 minutes weekly.
RAG-tracker tells you what to revisit. Re-read only the Reds. Revisit Ambers a fortnight later. Re-test before the next class.
Pricing
Seventeen topics live. More shipping.
Topics 1–9 (Criminal Law), the complete 6-module Tort suite, and 2 Paper 3 modules (Nature of Law, Law and Morality) are live now (A-Level · OCR H418, OCR H018, AQA 7162). Pay once per topic, own it forever, free updates as content lands. Topics 10–11 (GBH s.20, GBH s.18 with intent) ship next. Property Offences and Defences follow.
Available now
A-Level · OCR H418/01 · Paper 1
Topic 1 — General Elements
£6.99
One-off · Lifetime updates · 14-day refund
Interactive HTML study file
53-page printable revision guide (PDF)
Actus reus · Mens rea · Causation · Strict liability
RAG tracker · model paragraphs · practice questions
Five subject areas plus Law Making — the full OCR (H418 & H018) and AQA Law specifications, A-Level and AS-Level. Criminal Law's Topics 1–9 are live now, plus the complete 6-module Tort suite (Paper 2) and 2 Paper 3 modules (Nature of Law, Law and Morality); Topic 10 (GBH s.20 OAPA 1861) ships next, with email list members getting the early-access link first. The rest of the roadmap is being built and shipped from May 2026 onwards.
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Criminal Law
General Elements · Murder · Manslaughter · Non-Fatal Offences · Property Offences · Defences
Four real content boxes from Topic 1. Same fonts, same colours, same level of detail you'll get when you download the full file.
R v Pittwood [1902] ⭐⭐⭐🏆 OCR mark scheme
AssizesActus Reus — Omissions (duty by contract)
Facts
The defendant was a railway-crossing gatekeeper. He left the gate open and went for lunch. A horse and cart crossed the line and the driver was struck and killed by an oncoming train.
Held
Convicted of manslaughter. He owed a duty by virtue of his contract of employment — a duty not just to his employer, but to the public who relied on the gate.
Principle
A failure to act can amount to actus reus where the defendant is under a contractual duty to act and the public relies on that duty being performed.
Use it in an exam
This is the lead case for duty by contract. Use it whenever the scenario shows someone employed in a safety-critical role failing to do their job (lifeguards, security guards, signalmen, anyone whose contract creates a duty to third parties).
Try it
How confident are you with this case?
💡 Examiner Tip — Oblique intent
The 2022 H418/01 examiner report noted that on Q6 (the Kareem mens rea question), "few explained oblique intent accurately". Most candidates either missed it or quoted R v Woollin [1998] without applying the two-part test.
The two-part test is non-negotiable:
(1) Was the consequence a virtually certain result of the defendant's act? (2) Did the defendant foresee it as virtually certain?
If both, the jury is entitled to find intention — they're not required to. State the test, apply it, and acknowledge the discretion. That's a Level 4 paragraph.
Most candidates collapse causation into one paragraph: "the defendant caused the death because the chain wasn't broken." That's a Level 2 answer.
Causation is two separate tests, applied in order:
Step 1 — Factual causation. The "but for" test from R v White [1910]. But for the defendant's act, would the result still have happened?
Step 2 — Legal causation. Was the defendant's act still the operating and substantial cause when the result occurred? R v Smith [1959] is the lead case (the stabbed soldier dropped three times on the way to the medical station).
Two paragraphs, two cases, two clear conclusions. That's the structure mark schemes reward.
🎯 AO3 — Strict Liability: necessary or unjust?
Strict liability offences impose criminal liability without proof of mens rea — most commonly in regulatory contexts (food safety, road traffic, environmental protection). The Law Commission has long argued they protect the public efficiently: in Harrow LBC v Shah [1999], strict liability for selling lottery tickets to under-16s placed the burden of vigilance on retailers, who are best placed to prevent harm.
The counter-argument is that strict liability convicts those who acted reasonably. In Sweet v Parsley [1970], Lord Reid recognised the presumption of mens rea precisely because criminal conviction carries moral stigma — and stigma without fault is, in most defensible accounts of justice, wrong.
The compromise — and the position most A* candidates argue for — is that strict liability is justified only where three conditions are met: the offence is genuinely regulatory rather than truly criminal, the penalty is proportionate (typically a fine, not imprisonment), and a due-diligence defence is available. On that test, much current strict liability passes; some — particularly the harshest "state of affairs" offences like R v Larsonneur (1933) — does not.
This is the static version. Every tab in the full module is fully interactive.
First reviews are landing as students work through Topic 1. More coming through June as they sit OCR and AQA papers.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Genuinely impressed — the notes are clear, well-structured, and the mini tests at the end of each section make revision so much easier. They're going straight into my flashcards!
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Emmanuella K.
A-Level Law student
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
The LawByLak revision pack is really useful — I like that it tracks everything, has active recall built in, and everything's summed up in the summaries.
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Honey Lee
A-Level Law student
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
I found these notes incredibly helpful for breaking down complex legal topics into clear and understandable sections. The explanations are concise, well-structured, and easy to revise from before lectures or exams. What I particularly liked was how the notes simplified difficult case law and legal principles without losing important detail. They saved me a lot of time and made studying far less overwhelming. I would definitely recommend this website to other students looking for reliable and student-friendly law revision materials.
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Ryan Shingfield
A-Level Law student
My story
I built the resource I wish I'd had.
Lakshan SatheeskumarWorking in law · Tutoring A-Level Law every week
I studied Law at university and graduated with a First. I went on to complete a Master's in Law as well — because I wanted to understand the subject as deeply as it can be understood, not just well enough to pass.
Alongside my studies, I started tutoring. Across several years I delivered 1,000+ hours of tutoring across multiple subjects, with A-Level and AS-Level Law as my specialism — and watched the same problems repeat with every student. The same misread of mens rea. The same skipped causation step. The same confusion about which cases are actually on the OCR or AQA spec and which aren't.
Now I work inside legal practice and I'm qualifying soon. LawByLak is the resource my own tutees keep asking me for — rewritten, redesigned, and built around what I actually do with them in lessons.
Every topic is checked against the real OCR (H418 & H018) and AQA specifications, examiner reports and past papers. Cases verified, mark-scheme language used, audit-corrected where commentary and casebook gloss had drifted from the actual judgments. Accuracy isn't a marketing claim — it's how I work.
— Lak
FAQ
Questions I get every week.
Is this for OCR only, or does it work for AS-Level and AQA too?+
It covers all four. Topic 1 is built primarily against OCR H418 (A-Level) and H018 (AS-Level), and General Elements (actus reus, mens rea, causation, strict liability, transferred malice, coincidence) is core territory on AQA Law too — at both A-Level and AS-Level. The cases, the principles and the mark-scheme language overlap heavily across all four. Where AQA-specific spec wording differs, dedicated AQA-specific topic files will follow.
What's actually inside a topic?+
For Topic 1: 14 tabs of content, 21,000 words, 53 named cases, 22 practice questions across 5 difficulty tiers, 10 AO3 evaluation paragraphs, 5 mnemonics, an interactive RAG tracker that saves your progress, a mind map, mnemonic flashcards, dark mode, a reading-progress bar, and a printable PDF version included in the same purchase.
Who built this?+
LawByLak is built by Lak — a working legal professional currently qualifying as a solicitor. Lak holds a First-Class Law degree and a Master's in Law, has delivered 1,000+ hours of tutoring with A-Level and AS-Level Law as the specialism across OCR (H418 & H018) and AQA, and built LawByLak from inside that teaching practice. Every topic is checked against the real OCR and AQA specifications, examiner reports and past papers — with mark-scheme language and audit-corrected case facts throughout.
Can I print it?+
Yes. Every topic comes with a printable PDF version included in the same purchase, and the interactive HTML version has a print-friendly stylesheet built in (try Cmd/Ctrl+P).
What devices does it work on?+
Anything that opens an HTML file — phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, Chromebook. The file works completely offline once downloaded. The PDF works wherever PDFs work. iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux all fine.
What's your refund policy?+
If the file isn't what you expected, email hello@lawbylak.co.uk within 14 days and I'll sort a refund. Honest is honest — if it isn't useful to you, you shouldn't have paid for it.
Will more topics be added?+
Yes — see the roadmap above. Criminal Law continues with Murder, Manslaughter, Non-Fatal Offences, Property Offences and Defences. After Criminal Law, the build expands into Tort, Contract, Human Rights, English Legal System and Law Making — covering the full OCR (H418 & H018) and AQA Law specifications. Email list members get notified as each topic ships.
How is this different from Save My Exams or Tutor2u?+
Save My Exams is friendly but generic — it's not OCR or AQA-specific in depth, and the Law content is broad rather than exam-board precise. Tutor2u is comprehensive but visually dated, no real interactivity, and not built around either OCR's or AQA's mark scheme. LawByLak is built by a working-in-law tutor who teaches A-Level and AS-Level Law every week, against the actual OCR (H418 & H018) and AQA specifications, with mark-scheme language, audit-checked cases, and exam-ready application on every page. That's the difference.
Free sample
Read 5 pages before you buy.
A 5-page PDF sample from Topic 1 — the actus reus introduction, two case-boxes, a worked example, and a Common Mistake. Yours when you join the email list.
✓ Thanks — check your inbox. The sample's on its way (and I'll email you whenever a new topic ships).
Plus: Topic 9 (ABH — s.47 OAPA 1861) ships next. Email list members get the early-access link first — before it goes live on the site.
