I am very glad John brought up IRAC. Although, I have not started school yet, it is something that I am already very familiar with. The good people over at Law Preview warned my class two weeks ago that all of our law schools would try to indoctrinate us into the legal analysis method that is IRAC. It seems like Catholic has already begun, and its only the third day.
To be completely honest, the Law Preview instructors did not have much nice to say about IRAC. In fact, they flat out thumbed their noses at it. To quote the Law Preview text book:
Praised for its simplicity, IRAC has helped hundreds of thousands of students survive their law school exams. But if you are interested in doing more than just surviving your exams - if you want to conquer them - then you will see how using this methodology is far too limiting for students who want to earn a top spot in their class
Ouch! Law Preview instead recommends their own equally cheesy acronym for law students wishing to do legal analysis: DRAC. This supposedly superior approach lists the 4 steps of analysis as 1.)Dispute, 2.) Rule 3.) Arguments, 4.) Conclusion. The key difference here is in step 3. In IRAC, so they say, simply applying the legal issue to the case you are discussing unnecessarily limits the scope of your analysis, whereas laying out all the potential arguments that each party could possibly make in a dispute (the DRAC way) will broaden your analysis to include not only factual issues, but also legal and public policy issues as well, and therefore give you a more complete and more correct answer.
Yeah, whatever all that means! However, DRAC is essentially the big scoop that Law Preview offers its students. So for anyone out there who is planning on attending law school in '09 or later and was thinking of taking Law Preview, I just saved you $1,200.
1 comment:
That is funny to hear that the prep course discusses DRAC rather than IRAC. What I have seen within my studies so far is that IRAC during the developmental phases of my legal writing will be limiting; however, in due time, I will need to incorporate policy issues, hierarchical nature of authority, synthesis of incremental authority and the development of arguments for both sides. Then we moved on to a discussion about Broad and Narrow analogies.
So in essence I am learning DRAC but it is IRAC with an asterisk that reads that IRAC is only the basic device that needs to delve further into the broadening of your analysis once the skill is mastered.
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