IRAC Writing for Law School Success

IRAC stands for “Issue, Rule, Application (or “analysis”), Conclusion.” The structure is an effective way to format legal analysis in an essay exam answer. Below is a brief explanation of each part of the IRAC –something you will learn much more about in law school.

To get a head start and learn more about IRAC before you begin law school or during your 1L year, try this online lesson, free for Touro Law students –and find many other law school success lessons at this link. In CALI’s words:

This lesson will cover the basic structure of written legal analysis: IRAC. IRAC stands for Issue, Rule, Application/Analysis, Conclusion. There are slightly different versions of IRAC which may be used for different legal documents. This lesson will focus on IRAC for essay exam writing. Some faculty may prefer CRAC, or CIRAC, where the conclusion is placed first. You may also learn CRREAC for writing legal memos and briefs, which stands for Conclusion, Rule, Rule Explanation, Application, Conclusion. Make sure you know your professor’s structural preferences regarding exams and other assignments. Whether you have the conclusion up front or not, all of legal analysis follows the same basic IRAC framework. It takes some getting used to, but once you understand how to properly work with the IRAC structure, you will be able to analyze any legal question.

Issue:

The issue is the legal question, essentially “what is in controversy in these facts.” As you will learn throughout your legal education, that critical question is not as simple as it sounds. You must understand the law that governs a particular situation to identify the legal questions each new set of facts pose.
In your first-year criminal law class some of the issues may involve whether the defendant committed certain crimes. You will learn to analyze those questions fully when you understand the elements (required parts) of each crime. In contracts, some of the issues will include whether a valid offer was made or whether and when it was accepted. Again, by mastering the law of that part of contracts we call “contract formation” you will learn the law that will help you spot the issues when reading new fact patters.
Some professors will give you specific directions on how to format or phrase specific issues statements. Others will allow that to your discretion.

Rule:

The rules you must learn in law school are not compiled in one book for each subject. You learn them from a combination of studying appellate court decisions (cases in your casebook), reading statutes (laws enacted by legislatures), and commentary about those rules (from your professor and from your assigned and outside reading and studying).
In an essay exam answer, you will not write everything you have learned about the relevant rule, but you will write enough about the law to provide the context needed to analyze the facts. As you will learn, rules and facts are inextricably linked.

Application/Analysis:

This is where your writing proves that the facts meet or fail to meet the relevant legal rules. This section is the most important part of your answer. It is where you match up the component parts of the applicant legal rules to the particular facts in the exam question. It’s the connection between rule and fact.

Conclusion

This wraps up your analysis by stating its logical result –often that a particular rule or set of rules has or has not been established under the facts. You may state conclusions as to each element or part of a rule, for example, “therefore, the defendant’s act of spitting on the plaintiff was both harmful and offensive,” and for the entire answer, perhaps something such as, “for the reasons stated above, the defendant will likely be found guilty of all of the charged offenses.”
One of the hardest things to learn about law school essay exams (but one of the most liberating once you “get it”) is that there is often no single “right” answer. Rather, points are awarded for the logical, detailed way that students write about how the facts do or do not prove the particular rules in question.