Legal Commentary

I say good. 

Virtually every LRW teacher will teach IRAC in some form or another.  For many, it may well be the centerpiece of writing instruction.  God knows that there are problems with teaching students IRAC, though.  It can make their writing superficial, too structured, too rote, and not analytical enough.  Still, broached the right way, IRAC is a powerful tool for the lawyer.

Why teach/learn IRAC?

The first thing to know is that some version of the IRAC structure is what a law-trained audience expects to read.  A talented writer can write brilliant analysis with some radical non-IRACy structure, but the busy judge, attorney, or law clerk reviewing it will find it difficult to read.  Imagine looking at the front page of the newspaper and finding that the lead story is written as a lengthy poem in iambic pentameter, or as a first-person narrative.  Poetry and first-person narrative writing can be graceful, brilliant, moving, informative, and profound.  But if you are looking at the front page of the newspaper, you probably want the news delivered to you in the format that you expect; and if it isn?t, the author has made your life harder than he should have.  Thus, the first reason to IRAC is that this is what the profession expects.

Second, IRAC is a useful tool for structuring legal writing, and we must give the novice a structure.

Third?and this is a topic for something much more than a blog post?IRAC does something for lawyers, because it presents what are often normative and value-based arguments as formalist and scientific arguments and conclusions.  Although many claim that "we are all realists now," that's not how cases are won or lost.

As much as we badmouth IRAC?experienced attorneys scoff at it, judges disdain it, and students hate it?it serves a central function. Indeed, go deconstruct any experienced attorney?s most recent brief or any decent judicial opinion (including those authored by the scoffers and disdainers) and you will find some version of, or riff on, IRAC. Lawyers write in IRAC even when they aren?t conscious of it, and it provides a useful way to write a persuasive analysis of the law.

That said, it is emphatically the LRW instructor?s job to teach students to IRAC in a sophisticated rather than superficial way?IRAC is not the be-all, end-all of legal writing.  It is extremely malleable, and there are lots of variations on it; it may even make sense to eschew the structure altogether in a particular case.  But as I have told my students, you need to understand and have control over the convention that you are choosing to reject, and you must be able to articulate why you are rejecting it in any particular case.