Welcome to LearnLawBetter where today I am going to provide you with 3 steps you must
take on your essay exams to improve your analysis.
By following these steps, your analysis section will be more focused, resulting in better
grades.
Hi, this is Beau Baez, and today I am going to provide you with three steps you should
take to improve the analysis section of your essay exams.
For a law school essay exam, your answer should be organized using the IRAC method: Issue,
Rule, Analysis, and Conclusion—watch my prior video if you are unfamiliar with the
IRAC method.
Step 1 is to let the reader know what part of the rule you are discussing.
Often times a rule statement must be discussed in parts because the rule has more than one
significant component.
Take defamation, for example.
Defamation occurs when the defendant makes a false statement concerning the plaintiff,
to a third party, that is defamatory in nature.
This one rule statement has five significant parts.
Or if you prefer, 5 elements.
The five parts include: the defendant, the plaintiff, a third party, a false statement,
and a defamatory statement.
So for Step 1, tell the reader which element you are discussing, and please, please, don’t discuss all
5 in a weird jumbled mess.
Step 2 requires you to provide the facts and logical inferences from those facts that deal
with the element you are discussing.
Step 3, which is the most important step, requires you to tell the reader why and how
the facts are connected to the element.
Let’s use the false statement element as our example.
In step 1 we state the following: “The first element in this defamation law suit is determining
whether Joe made a false statement.”
The reader now knows exactly what you are about to discuss.
For step 2 we say something like: “Bill was in Mexico on the day that Brittny was
murdered, so it was impossible for Bill to have killed her.”
Think about that for a second.
These facts may be correct, but they don’t EXPLICITLY tell the reader why or how they
are false.
In other words, you cannot expect the reader to IMPLICTLY know what you are doing with
those facts.
So now we get to Step 3, where you tell the reader the how and the why.
Using defamation again, we start tying everything together as follows: “Since Bill was not
anywhere near Britney on or at the time she was murdered, the statement that Joe made was false.”
You can then end that section with a quick conclusion, something to the affect like “The first
element to defamation is met.”
If you fail to follow these 3 steps, your answer will read more like a story rather
than analysis.
Here is an example of a poor answer: “Joe made a false statement when he said that Bill
murdered Britney.
Bill was in Mexico on the day that Britney was murdered, so the first element of this
tort is met.”
Did you notice that in this statement the writer did not explain how the facts were connected
to the falsity requirement?
Sure, the reader could infer, from the sentence, that there was a false statement. But a law school and bar exam is
about explicitly stating things rather than relying on the implicit understanding by the
reader.
In other words, explain everything to the reader and leave nothing to the reader’s
imagination.
If it remains unwritten, then it also receives no credit on the exam.
As we wrap up this session, I would like to thank Law Professor Matthews for his suggestion
that I discuss this topic today.
If you have any questions or would like me to talk on a topic that interests you, please
leave a comment below.
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