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20 Legal Writing: J. Legal Writing Inst. 233 (2015)
Flexible IRAC: A Best Practices Guide

handle is hein.journals/jlwriins20 and id is 240 raw text is: FLEXIBLE IRAC: A BEST PRACTICES GUIDE Tracy Turner* L INTRODUCTION Existing scholarship on the proper organization of a legal analysis is dominated by the IRAC paradigm and its numerous spin-offs.1 IRAC stands for Issue, Rule (i.e., discussion of the relevant law on an issue), Application (i.e., application of the law to the case at hand), and Conclusion.2 The IRAC paradigm is based on an adaptation of deductive syllogism to legal reasoning: Major Premise: All men are mortal. (The R in IRAC) Minor Premise: Socrates is a man. (The A in IRAC) Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is mortal.3 Paradigms like IRAC are helpful tools for novice legal writers who are otherwise faced with a seemingly impossible task: identifying and imitating quality in a field of writing that is not blessed with consistency in either its quality or its form.4 On the other hand, some scholars have noted significant drawbacks in *. C 2015, Tracy Turner. All rights reserved. Tracy Turner is the Director of the Legal Analysis, Writing, and Skills Program at Southwestern Law School. Thank you to Michelle Keshishi, Kevin Miller, and Schyler Silverman for their help on this Article and to Austen Parrish for his thoughtful comments. 1. See Tracy Turner, Finding Consensus in Legal Writing Discourse Regarding Or- ganizational Structure: A Review and Analysis of the Use of IRAC and Its Progenies, 9 LEGAL COMM. & RHETORIC: JALWD 351 (2012) (discussing various alternative acronyms proposed by scholars and concluding that none of the alternative acronyms depart from the rules-first core of IRAC, which still dominates the discourse). 2. Many scholars advise legal writers to start with a conclusion rather than an issue statement, especially in persuasive writing. See id. at 359 (surveying the literature on whether legal writing should start with an issue or conclusion in objective writing). For ease of reference, this Article will treat issue as synonymous with thesis or conclusion and will use the IRAC paradigm as an umbrella term encompassing the numerous related paradigms such as CRAC, CREAC, TRAC, etc. See id. at 357 (listing all of the various acronyms that have been generated by legal writing professors). 3. E.g. CHARLES R. CALLEROS, LEGAL METHOD AND LEGAL WRITING 82 (7th ed. 2014); REID RAMBO & LEANNE J. PFLAUM, LEGAL WRITING BY DESIGN 20-21 (2d ed. 2013). 4. Turner, supra note 1, at 351-52 n.2 (listing forty published articles that have discussed the benefits of paradigms).

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