Family law is where knowing things hurts most.
Every candidate arrives with intuitions about marriage, custody, maintenance and inheritance — from family, from news, from television. Those intuitions sit close enough to the actual legal tests to feel like law, and a passage that departs slightly from them will catch anybody reading on autopilot.
The method is the same as everywhere else in this section. The difference is how strong the pull away from it is.
The principles that recur
Conditions for a valid marriage. Age, capacity, consent, prohibited degrees of relationship, and whether an existing marriage subsists. Passages typically give three or four conditions and facts that satisfy some of them, then ask about validity — and the question often turns on whether a defect makes a marriage void or merely voidable, which are different outcomes with different consequences.
Grounds for divorce. Cruelty, desertion, and the requirement that a ground be made out rather than asserted. Desertion questions are common because the stated principle usually contains several elements — separation, an intention to desert, the absence of consent, and a period of time — and the facts satisfy all but one.
Maintenance. Who may claim, from whom, and on what basis. Passages here usually turn on whether a claimant is within the class the principle describes, and on whether the ability to maintain oneself defeats the claim.
Custody and the welfare principle. The most frequent of all, because the principle is a standard rather than a rule: the welfare of the child is the paramount consideration. A standard generates good questions precisely because it has to be applied rather than looked up. Expect facts in which the parent with the stronger legal claim is not the one the standard points to.
Guardianship and adoption. Who may be a guardian, who may adopt, and what conditions attach. These lend themselves to questions about eligibility, which are usually clean applications if you read the conditions carefully.
Succession. Who inherits, in what share, and how a class of heirs is defined. Arithmetic sometimes appears here — shares divided among a described class — and it is worth doing on paper rather than in your head.
How the passages are built
The architecture is stable enough to recognise in the first ten seconds.
Three or four principles, each a sentence or two. Then a fact situation with more than one person in it — typically a family, with facts attached to each member that will matter for one question and not for another. Then four or five questions.
The distinctions the facts draw are the map. If the passage bothers to tell you one child is fourteen and the other is six, there is a question about it. If it tells you a party was aware of something, awareness is an element of a principle somewhere above.
Question types, roughly in order of frequency: clean application of one principle; a combination of two; a "which additional fact would change the answer" question; and occasionally a question about which principle applies at all.
The three traps
Answering from real law. The trap this area is built for. The passage's principle governs, even where it differs from the Hindu Marriage Act, from a judgment you have read, or from what you are confident is true. A candidate who has read more is in more danger here, not less.
Answering from fairness. The welfare principle in particular invites this. A passage will give you a sympathetic parent and a principle that does not favour them, and one of the four options will be the humane answer. It will be wrong.
Missing an element of a multi-part test. Desertion and cruelty principles usually have three or four components joined by "and". The facts will satisfy all but one. Underline the connectives before you read the facts and this trap mostly disappears.
A worked passage
Read the principles, then the facts, then answer before reading on.
Principle 1. A person is deemed to have deserted their spouse where they have separated from the spouse, intended to bring cohabitation permanently to an end, acted without the spouse's consent and without reasonable cause, and where that state of affairs has continued for a period of not less than two years. Principle 2. In any proceeding concerning the custody of a minor, the welfare of the minor is the paramount consideration, and any other claim is subordinate to it. Principle 3. A parent who has deserted their spouse is not for that reason alone disqualified from being granted custody of a minor. Facts. Ila and Bhaskar married in 2018 and have one child, Neel, who is seven. In March 2022 Ila moved to another city to take up work, telling Bhaskar she intended to return when the assignment ended. The assignment ended in 2023. She did not return, and from that point told Bhaskar she did not intend to. Bhaskar has not consented to the separation. Neel has lived with Bhaskar throughout, attends school near him, and a court-appointed expert reports that moving him would be disruptive. Ila has since remarried and lives in a larger home. Bhaskar works long hours and Neel is cared for after school by a grandparent.
From when does the two-year period run? From 2023, not March 2022. Principle 1 requires an intention to bring cohabitation permanently to an end, and on the facts Ila left with a stated intention to return. The intention arrived when the assignment ended and she said she would not come back. The trap is the 2022 date, which is prominent, early and wrong.
Has Ila deserted Bhaskar? On these facts, yes, if the period from 2023 has run for two years — separation, intention, absence of consent, and no reasonable cause given. Note what you are not asked to weigh: whether her leaving for work was reasonable at the time. Principle 1 asks about the period during which all four elements were present.
Does the desertion decide custody? No. Principle 3 says so expressly, and it is there to stop you reasoning from fault to custody. A candidate who has not read Principle 3 carefully will answer this from moral bookkeeping.
Who should have custody? Principle 2 makes welfare paramount and subordinates everything else to it. The facts pointing at welfare are Neel's continuity — the same home, the same school, an expert view that moving is disruptive. The facts pointing at Ila are material: a larger home, more availability. The passage gives you an expert opinion on one side and inferences on the other, and an expert opinion on disruption is the stronger material on the stated standard.
Which additional fact would most change that? Something that speaks to welfare rather than to merit — evidence that the current arrangement is failing Neel, for instance. An additional fact about Ila's income or Bhaskar's working hours changes the material position without engaging the paramount consideration directly.
Practising it
Short loop, small sample, specific diagnosis.
Sit five family law passages timed. For each wrong answer, write one sentence naming the element you missed: not "I misread the facts", but "I ran the desertion period from the separation rather than from the intention". Then look for that specific failure in the next passage.
Most candidates find their errors concentrate in two places — usually a multi-element test and the fairness pull. Both are fixable in a week once named.
For the underlying method, the legal reasoning tips page sets out the principle-fact-application frame. The consumer protection, contract law and tort law pieces cover the same architecture in areas where the intuitions pull less hard — worth doing first if family law passages are currently costing you.
To find out how long a Legal Reasoning section actually takes you under a clock, the free Diagnostic Test is a full timed paper with a section-wise breakdown at the end.