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IRAC Guidelines
IRAC Guidelines
From week 3 you will be faced with legal problem solving questions. These questions will not ask
you to “discuss” or “critique” a theoretical question. You will be presented with a factual scenario,
a set of circumstances, that describes the interactions of two or more people that leads to some form
of disagreement over the legal relationship(s) that these facts have created.
It will be your task within the tutorial time limitations to give some kind of advice to one or more of
the people mentioned in the scenario. This practice in the tutorials will have direct beneficial
outcomes to you in preparation for the final examination in MBS502. The final examination in this
unit will be based in large part on similarly structured questions.
The legal problem solving model that is most commonly used is characterised by the acronym
“IRAC”. This stands for “Issue”, “Rule of law”, “Application of rule to facts” and “Conclusion”.
Step 4 – Conclusion
Do not forget that in Australia we have an adversarial system of solving legal disputes. This
means that for every legal dispute there are at least two different points of view. This means
that for any given scenario there may be more than one possible conclusion. In this step you
have to select one of these possible conclusions and argue, in a summary form, the case you
have prepared in steps 2 and 3 above.
Whatever you do, you must answer the question posed at step 1.
Acknowledgements
This information sheet is a summary compilation from the information provided by the following
texts;
Brogan M, & Spencer D., “Surviving Law School”, 2005 edition, Oxford University Press,
Melbourne, Australia.
Dworsky AL., “The Little Book on Legal Writing”, 1990, Fred B Rothman & Co., Colorado, USA