The John Locke Institute publishes a small selection of past winning essays on its website. There are seven, covering six categories and two Junior prizes, from the 2021 and 2023 cycles. They are the only public record of what a prize-winning essay looks like, and almost nobody who enters reads them properly. We did, with the judging criteria beside us, and this guide sets out what they have in common. Every quotation below is from the essay as published; links go to the Institute's own PDFs.
The seven essays
| Cycle | Category | Prize | Author | Question |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Economics | First | Kit Young Tham | Suppose a government relied solely on money newly created by the central bank. What would be the advantages and/or disadvantages? |
| 2021 | History | First | Major Shokar | Should we judge those from the past by the standards of today? How will historians in the future judge us? |
| 2023 | Psychology | Third | Hannah Kim | Are beliefs voluntary? |
| 2023 | Theology | Second | Shivrav Sharma | If you cannot persuade your intelligent, sympathetic friends to embrace your religious belief system, do you have enough reason to believe what you believe? |
| 2021 | Law | Second | Huaming Li | Should "innocent until proven guilty" apply not only to courts of law, but also to public censure? |
| 2021 | Junior | First | Joonyoung Heo | Should the law ever prevent people from freely making self-harming decisions? If so, what should and shouldn't be forbidden, and according to which principles? |
| 2023 | Junior | First | Eujiny Cho | Which characteristics distinguish successful movements for social change from unsuccessful ones? |
The official criteria are "knowledge and understanding of the relevant material, the competent use of evidence, quality of argumentation, originality, structure, writing style and persuasive force." What follows is how these seven essays meet them.
1. The verdict arrives by the second paragraph
Every one of the seven essays tells you its answer before the reader has turned the page. Tham's Economics essay opens with the puzzle (why can't governments just print money?) and then, in paragraph two: "This essay argues that financing fiscal expenditure solely by creating of money ... is economically infeasible because it risks hyperinflation and worsening income inequality. However, partial financing ... does have its uses in times of cyclical economic downturns." That is the whole essay in two sentences, including the concession.
Li's Law essay does the same with a numbered promise: "I argue that the presumption of innocence principle ('PIP') should not apply to public censure for the following three reasons," and then names them. Sharma's Theology essay announces its thesis at the end of the first page: "in matters of religious belief, those who disagree are almost never epistemic peers."
Shortlisted essays that go no further usually withhold the verdict until the conclusion, on the theory that suspense is persuasive. To an academic reader it is not. Say what you think, then earn it.
2. The question is taken apart before it is answered
Shokar's History essay spends its first four paragraphs on the question itself. Does the historian judge at all? (Yes: Berlin, Butterfield and Carr are cited to show that even "descriptive" history involves judgement.) Are there "standards of today"? (Not really: "standards are defined as much by geography and culture than by chronology," and even within one period they vary by class, gender and race.) What is presentism? (A footnote gives Armitage's five definitions and settles on the dictionary's.) Only then does the argument begin, and by then the reader trusts the writer to handle the material.
Sharma does it in one move, turning a vague question about persuading friends into a precise one from the epistemology of disagreement: are your friends your epistemic peers? He defines the term from Thomas Kelly and the rest of the essay follows from the definition.
This is what "knowledge and understanding of the relevant material" looks like in practice. It is not a literature review. It is showing that you know which question the prompt is really asking.
3. The strongest counter-case gets the most space
Tham's essay is about why printing money causes inflation, and its longest analytical passage is about Japan, where it did not: "Despite expanding the money supply in 2013 and Yield Curve Control in 2016, Japan has struggled against deflation for decades." The essay then explains why Japan does not generalise (weak private demand, high propensity to save, bank reserves not lent out) and why "in the case where printing money is the sole method of funding the fiscal expenditure, the extent of printing money is so great that inflation is guaranteed." The counter-case is not acknowledged; it is defeated.
Heo's Junior essay is built entirely on this move. It sets out Mill's harm principle sympathetically, calls it "compelling", and then: "there is a deficiency in Mill's defense of autonomy: there are instances where his blanket prohibition on legal paternalism has suboptimal consequences." The essay's own contribution is the repair, using Scanlon's account of the value of choice to say exactly when paternalism is legitimate: the coerced, the mentally incapacitated, the intoxicated and the young.
Kim's Psychology essay, which placed third rather than first, is the exception that shows the rule. It argues that belief is involuntary and supports the claim with three bodies of evidence, but it never gives the other side a paragraph. It is a strong essay; it is not a first-prize essay, and the missing counter-argument is the most visible reason.
4. A technical frame from the literature carries the argument
None of these essays argues from common sense. Each borrows a precise tool from the academic literature and uses it to do the work:
Sharma: uses "epistemic peer" (Kelly), "interim beliefs" and "methodological conservatism" (Gutting).
Heo: uses Scanlon's distinction between the instrumental and symbolic value of choice, and applies it case by case.
Li: uses the "public figure" doctrine from New York Times v. Sullivan and Gertz v. Robert Welch to define who is subject to public censure, and the ICCPR to ground free expression.
Shokar: uses Williams's "relativism of distance" and Fricker's "should have known better" test, and finds both wanting.
Tham: uses Fisher's quantity theory, the Keynesian multiplier and central-bank independence data, each introduced when the argument needs it.
The tool is always named, sourced and then used. This is the difference between an essay that mentions Mill and an essay that does something with him.
5. Sources are primary, plentiful and properly cited
The essays cite a lot, and they cite from the original. Tham's essay has thirty-nine endnotes, almost all to central banks, the IMF, the BIS, journal articles and working papers. Shokar's has twenty-two, including Chateaubriand's memoirs, the 1804 Code Civil, Carr, Butterfield, Croce and journal articles from History and Theory. Li's Law essay uses Bluebook form throughout: "New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964)".
Two practical points follow. First, the Institute requires endnotes, not footnotes, and a bibliography; the winning essays follow the rules to the letter. Second, the sources are chosen to be checkable. A judge who wants to verify a claim can. Essays that cite only popular books, or that paraphrase a thinker without a reference, read as under-researched next to these.
6. The opening is concrete
Not one of the seven begins with a definition or a dictionary. Sharma opens on the battlefield of the Mahabharata, with Arjuna seeing the divine and unable to explain it to anyone. Heo opens with Michael Bloomberg's 2012 ban on large sugary drinks and the court that struck it down. Shokar opens with Chateaubriand writing after the July Revolution. Cho's Junior essay opens by naming the picture in the reader's head (King, Friedan, Pankhurst, marches and speeches) in order to argue against it.
The opening case is not decoration. In each essay it returns as a test of the argument: Bloomberg's ban is the first of Heo's three applications; Arjuna's epistemic peers are the essay's central question.
What the two Junior winners add
The Junior essays are shorter on citations and no less rigorous in structure. Cho's essay on social movements makes a genuinely original move: it argues that the Western benchmark of success (legislative change) cannot be applied to movements in undemocratic states, and supports the claim with the LGBTQ+ movement under apartheid, the Rondas Campesinas of Peru and Bayat's "non-movements" in Iran. A reader learns something. Heo's essay repairs Mill. Neither reads like a school essay, and neither could have been written without months of reading, which is the honest answer to how much preparation a Junior prize needs.
What this means for a 2027 entry
A checklist, drawn from the seven essays:
State the verdict by paragraph two: , including your main concession.
Take the question apart first: define the contested term, say which question you are really answering.
Give the strongest counter-case your longest paragraph: , then explain why it does not win.
Borrow one precise tool from the literature: , name its source, and use it to do the argument's work.
Cite from primary sources in endnotes: , in a recognised form, and cite enough that a sceptic can check you.
Open with a concrete case: that you will return to.
The category pages on this site do this work question by question for the 2026 set, and will for the 2027 set within 48 hours of release: Philosophy, Politics, Economics, History, Psychology, Theology, Law, International Relations, Public Policy and Science and Technology.
Where to read the essays
All seven are on the Institute's past essays page at johnlockeinstitute.com/past-essays. Read them before you read anything by a prep company, including us. Then, if you want the method that took 38 of our 41 students to the 2026 shortlist, our John Locke Essay Competition prep programmes are compared side by side, with fees, on one page. The rules those essays were written under are in our complete guide to the John Locke Essay Competition.