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Thursday, February 19, 2009
Legal Writing from Law School to the Bar Exam
As discussions about writing final exams and drafting sample bar essays swirl around the library, it is time to emphasize the basics that you all know. Repeat after me: IRAC! IRAC! IRAC! It is impossible to emphasize this acronym enough. Every law school exam answer should state the issue, explain the rule governing the issue, analyze the facts pertinent to the issue and provide a conclusion. Organizing by using IRAC on an exam will help to ensure you cover all of the issues. Organizing by using IRAC on the Bar will help you get more points on each essay. (Remember, the bar essays are graded by tired attorneys. Don't make them work harder to see if you included the right information, because they are unlikely to take that extra time to try to understand your unique method of answering an essay.) A simple but very thorough explanation of IRAC can be found at this website. LawNerds will walk you through spotting the issue, outlining the rule, the analysis and the conclusion. What you will find on the internet is no substitute for the hard work of learning to think and write like a lawyer, but this site will help to clarify the basic framework required to answer law school exam questions and bar exam questions.
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3 comments:
I was pleasantly surprised by lawnerds.com. The name is offputting, but the content appears very good. I like the description of the 1 page attack outline for exam taking, but they forgot to suggest: write it down in the bluebook, or on scratch paper-then use it to uncover ALL of the issues in the exam question. Try it!
Lawerds is good. It reveals the most important truth about Law School. There are four important things to learn; How to think like a lawyer meaning to maro and micro visualize the legal issues. How to take your reading comprehension skills to new efficient heights. How to distinguish between non-ego driven writing (examenship) and ego driven writing (memo to a senior partner). Last, most important, taking these skills and transferring them onto one piece of paper. A 6th grader should be able to read the contents in the piece of paper.
I enjoyed LawNerds. Quite a practical site--though I don't often equate nerd with practical.
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