Claude Skills for Arts, Law & Social Science Students

Five ready-made Claude Skills for students in disciplines that run on close reading, argument, and citation rather than code: law, political science, history, sociology, literature, and related fields. No programming knowledge is needed to install or use any of them.

What a "Skill" is, in plain terms

A Skill is a folder of instructions that teaches Claude how to do one specific academic task the way you want it done, every time, without you re-explaining your standards in every conversation. You install it once. After that, Claude reads the file automatically when your request matches what the skill covers, and follows the instructions inside it.

The skills in this repository

Skill Best for What it does
source-triage Any discipline Reads a journal article, book chapter, or working paper and extracts its actual claim, what it argues against, its evidence type, and its concessions, placing it on a map of the wider debate rather than just summarising it.
academic-prose-audit Any discipline Reviews a drafted essay, response paper, or seminar note and fixes places where meaning is compressed or the writing reads mechanically, while protecting genuine academic hedging and formal register.
doctrinal-explainer Law (adaptable to any concept-heavy field) Explains a legal doctrine, case, or assigned reading in full depth for note-making: the problem it solves, the facts that shaped it, competing formulations, and its boundary conditions.
india-legal-research Law (India-specific) Researches Indian case law, statutes, and regulatory material online, enforcing a source hierarchy and tagging every citation as retrieved, recalled-unverified, or not found.
oscola-verify Law (OSCOLA jurisdictions) Checks the citations in a finished draft for court-level errors, wrong pinpoints, and unverified authorities before submission.

source-triage and academic-prose-audit are discipline-agnostic and work for history, political science, sociology, or literature essays as-is. The other three are written for legal study; a historian or political scientist could still adapt doctrinal-explainer's method to a theoretical framework or a policy instrument.

There is also a custom-instructions/ folder. It is a separate document, not a skill, and it is explained in its own section below.

Installing a skill in Claude.ai

  1. Go to claude.ai and sign in.
  2. Click your profile icon, or open Settings, then go to Customize > Skills.
  3. Click the + button, then + Create skill.
  4. Upload the relevant ZIP file from this repository's zips/ folder — for example, zips/source-triage.zip. You do not need to unzip it yourself.
  5. The skill appears in your skills list, toggled on by default. You can switch individual skills on or off per conversation from the Skills menu at the bottom of the chat window.
  6. Start a conversation and describe your task normally — "triage this article for my literature review" or "check the citations in this draft." Claude reads the skill's description and applies it automatically; you do not need to name the skill.

This uses the Skills feature under Settings > Customize > Skills, available on Claude.ai's paid plans with code execution enabled. If your account does not show a Skills option, the Claude Help Center article on using skills has current, plan-specific details, since this changes from time to time.

If you use Claude Code instead of the browser, drop the unzipped skill folder into ~/.claude/skills/ (applies everywhere) or .claude/skills/ inside a specific project folder (applies only there).

The custom-instructions/ folder

academic-mentor-voice.md is a standing set of instructions for how Claude should write and argue with you, not a task-specific skill, so it is not uploaded as a Skill ZIP. Instead you paste its contents into Settings > Customize > Custom instructions, or into a Project's own custom instructions if you only want it active for one course. The file explains this in more detail and includes the full text to copy. It was written for one student's law programme, so read it before adopting it and adjust the discipline-specific lines to fit your own.

Updating a skill later

If you improve a skill, edit the SKILL.md file (and any files in its references/, scripts/, or assets/ folder) directly on GitHub, re-download the folder, re-zip it, and upload it again through Customize > Skills. Claude replaces the old version.

Contributing

Pull requests that add a new discipline-agnostic skill, or adapt one of the law-specific skills for another field, are welcome. Keep each skill in its own folder with a SKILL.md at the root, and describe in the pull request what task the skill handles and when it should trigger.

License

The contents of this repository are released under the MIT License. You may use, adapt, and redistribute any skill here, including for your own course or institution.