Lecture 12 – Monday 6 May 2019, 12pm – 2pm, Room 8.

LW111 – COURTS AND

DISPUTE RESOLUTION
I

Dr Morsen Mosses,
Lecturer
USP School of Law
 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE
IRAC METHOD AND LEGAL
REASONING
 Dispute Resolution OVERVIEW
 The IRAC Method?
 Alternatives
 An Analytical Method?
 I-R-A-C
 Identifying & Stating the Issues
 Identifying & Stating the Issues: Note on Sub-Rules
 Identifying & Stating the Rules/Laws
 Applying the Rules to the Facts
 Stating the Conclusion
 Legal Reasoning (a brief introduction)

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 DISPUTE RESOLUTION?

 Courts apply relevant legislation and the ratio of

relevant previously decided cases to resolve
disputes brought before them.
 Similarly, lawyers identify and analyse client’s legal
issues by applying relevant law and preparing a
‘letter of advice’ or ‘opinion’ which explains
whether the client has a legal dispute and whether
the client is likely to be successful should the
dispute go before a court.
 At law school, rather than having real clients with
real legal issues, law teachers use hypothetical
disputes to enable students to practice their legal
problem solving skills in particular subject areas of
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law.
 THE IRAC METHOD?

 Problem-solving of this kind – drawing out legal

principles from fact scenarios, whether real or
hypothetical – is an essential task for legal
professionals, whether they are practising lawyers
or members of the judiciary.

 While there are many names for what is essentially

the same approach, the IRAC method is meant to
prepare students to solve such problems.

 This is closely tied to different varieties of legal

reasoning: deduction, induction, analogy, etc.
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 ALTERNATIVES

 Such problem-solving questions can cause

students, especially new students, some difficulty.

 This is largely because they do not understand how

to approach answering the question and how to
dissect, analyse and discuss it.
 To make it more complicated, legal problems rarely
have one clear and undeniably correct solution.

 For this reason, good answers to hypothetical

problem-solving questions should demonstrate
understanding of likely alternative arguments and
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the most likely conclusion.
 AN ANALYTICAL METHOD

 IRAC is a ‘top down’, analytical method for

organising, analysing, and deciding legal issues.
 It is modelled on the process that judges and
lawyers will follow in their work.
 Applying it enables students to identify legal
issues which may arise from a set of facts and
analyse how the law is most likely to apply to
each issue.
 With practice, IRAC enables them to prepare
accurate legal advice that is comprehensive and
presented in a logical way.

 Obviously, there are numerous ways in which this

 I-R-A-C

 IRAC stands for:

 Issue(s) or Identifying and Stating the Issue(s)
 Rule(s) (sometimes called ‘relevant law’) or
Identifying and Stating the Rule(s)
 Application or Applying the Rule(s) to the Facts
 Conclusion or Stating the Conclusion

  IRAC may appear to be a rather simplistic process

where each element operates in an unconnected
way with the others.

 In fact, there is considerable overlap between the7

 IDENTIFYING & STATING THE
ISSUE(S)
 A good answer to a problem question identifies the issues
relevant to the problem.

 The answer must also be confined to that specific issue and

not to everything known about the general subject matter.

 Once the issue is identified, the student will need to start

writing their advice. For example: ‘The issue is whether the
plaintiff, Sue Smith, was the legal spouse of the descendent at
his death and is therefore entitled to inherit the marital
property.’

 In addition, one set of facts in a problem situation will often

involve a number of different issues. Those issues will then
require specific research. 8
 IDENTIFYING & STATING THE
ISSUE(S): NOTE ON SUB-
ISSUE(S)
 Eg, if asked ‘whether JS will be liable for murder’, the first
place to look is the criminal law.

 After writing a sentence identifying the issue, you might set

out the elements of the law of murder which need to be
analysed.

 A logical way to prepare the answer would be to analyse each

element as a ‘sub-issue’:
 Did JS engage in conduct?
 Did JS’s conduct cause the death of another person?
 Did JS have intention to cause the other person’s death?

 For each of these ‘sub-issues’ or elements, they might need9 to

identify further relevant law before applying it to the facts to
IDENTIFYING & STATING THE
ISSUE(S): NOTE ON SUB-
ISSUE(S)
The analysis of each ‘sub-issue’ should follow
the IRAC structure and logically is part of the
‘Application’ of the Rules regarding murder
(the Issue) to the hypothetical facts.

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 IDENTIFYING AND STATING THE
RELEVANT RULE(S)/LAW(S)
 The next step is to state or outline the rule or
principle relevant to the issue(s), supported by the
relevant legal authorities (including precedent).

 Identifying the relevant rules will be easier in some

cases than others. Most often, legal problem-solving
is a matter of applying different rules which might
potentially apply to the issues depending on which
interpretation of the law the court accepts.

 These are quite separate from questions or issues of

fact.
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 IDENTIFYINH AND STATING
RELEVANT RULE(S)/LAW(S)
 In the Anglo-American tradition, legal rules are the
general propositions which are found in legislation
or decided cases.
 Finding the rule will typically require looking into cases
where judges have expressed views on the legal meaning
of the terms involved. They may be very complex in their
legal meaning and further research may be necessary.
 Again, these rules or principles rarely specify clearly all of
the factual situations to which they can be applied. Given
that human beings behave in an infinite variety of ways,
one has to try to fit the issues to a general rule or
principle.

 Quite often the issue will be whether some rule or

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principle can be stretched to govern particular

 APPLYING THE RULES TO THE
FACTS
 The application of the law to the facts of the problem involves
developing an argument that has a logical structure, that is
consistent, and that is supported by legal authority.

 When a judge is formulating a judgment, usually there is a

discussion of, and a decision on, the facts.
 The judge tries to determine how the evidence supports the
facts.
 Once the facts are settled, the court considers the relevant
legal issues. The process involved in bringing the case to
court often defines these issues. The court is asked to
decide certain issues and will not go beyond them.
 In deciding what the relevant legal rule or principle is, the
judge may divide the issue into segments.
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 APPLYING THE RULES TO THE
FACTS

 In effect, this often requires explaining how a rule

applied in earlier cases applies to the present case.
This can be thought of as having two parts.
Artificially dividing these might look like this:
1. In the Butler case, the court held that a motorized
bicycle qualified as a ‘vehicle’ pursuant to the
Transportation Code.
2. Like the motorized vehicle in the Butler case, the
motorized beach buggy in this case is also a vehicle
within the meaning of the Transportation Code
because it is not mechanically powered and not
dependent on human effort to move. 14
 APPLYING THE RULES TO THE
FACT
 In order to formulate the correct version of a principle, the
judge might have to engage in some degree of speculation
about its scope.
 This is a process of both interpretation and evaluation of the
relevant rule.
 Then the court looks at how the relevant rule applies to the
facts in the case, ie whether the facts in the case fit within the
Possible questions:
• To whatgeneral legal rule or principle they’ve decided on.
sort of situations was the rule or principle intended to apply?
 Stages
• What involved
was the original contextin
in the
whichprocess offormulated?
the rule was legal reasoning do not occur
• What was the principle designed to achieve?
• What in isolation
were the reasonsfrom oneforanother.
available the rule being invoked?
• Was it intended to have a restricted operation?
• Should the principle be formulated differently in order to clarify inconsistencies in the way it
was formulated?
• Should the rule be modified, extended or limited to make it more relevant to contemporary
society?
• What would be the consequences for society if the rule was reformulated in more broad or
more restricted terms?
• What do the words and expressions used in previous formulations of the rule mean in law? 15
• What type of situations does it cover?
• In the case of a statutory rule, what was the intention of the parliament when it passed the
APPLYING THE RULES TO THE
FACTS

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 STATING THE CONCLUSION
 When considering a final conclusion, students need to understand
that there might be no single conclusion to a problem.
 As demonstrated, there must be conclusions on each issue,
preferably at the end of discussion on each issue and a summary at
the end of the entire written advice. Students need a strategy to cope
with this situation.
 If several conclusions seem possible depending on how the court
interprets and applies the law, students should take care to explain
the possible interpretations and how they would affect the conclusion.

 Alternatively, it might be that a principle does not extend easily to a

new factual situation. Therefore, the principles need to be clarified
and only a decision of the court can resolve the matter. These
situations arise quite frequently in legal practice.
 Some clients, of course, still think that the law ought to provide clear
answers. However, this is not always the case. A student who can
clearly express their understanding that a particular legal issue may
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have different possible conclusions will often receive higher marks.

 LEGAL REASONING (A BRIEF
INTRODUCTION)
 Judges have to make decisions both logical in structure and
consistent with the law.
 This may not be conscious or even explicit, but is
nonetheless a rational process.
 Reasoning is an intellectual process of analysis and
construction, as distinct from the use of emotions or the
imagination.

 Judicial reasoning isn’t, however, mechanical. It may be

influenced by socio-political factors and it arguably requires
some flexibility to allow the courts to respond to changing
social and cultural conditions.

 In essence, the judge’s task is not a lot different to the one

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required for practicing lawyers and law students.
 LEGAL REASONING (A BRIEF
INTRODUCTION)

 In general, either as a lawyer or a judge, the reasoning

process involves several integrated elements:

• assembling the available information and facts

• identifying the legal problem
• researching the relevant law
• evaluating the relevance of the material and facts
• applying the law to the facts of the case
• formulating a number of possible solutions
• selecting an appropriate solution or recommendation

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 LEGAL REASONING (A BRIEF
INTRODUCTION)
 The most commonly used method of reasoning by lawyers and
judges is sometimes referred to as reasoning by analogy (or
inductive reasoning by analogy).
 Analogy is the similarity or correspondence between things
or events. In law, it joins similar or ‘like’ past and present
cases.
 In practice, the facts of different cases can only rarely be
seen as the same. It is a question of whether they are
sufficiently alike, or are alike in significant or material
respects.

 Legal reasoning of this sort involves both deduction and

induction. Each involve the relationship of general principles
and particular instances.
 Deduction is the process of reasoning in which a general 20

principle is applied to – or deduced in – a particular

 WEEK 13 TUTORIAL QUESTIONS
 Review Week Twelve’s lecture and the Tutorial Assignment Materials
posted on Moodle (under Week Thirteen).
 Prepare an IRAC analysis for the tutorials (including your name and
student ID number).

 To prepare the IRAC analysis for Week Thirteen’s tutorials, you

must:
1. Identify and state the issue(s)
2. Identify and stating any sub-issue(s)
3. Identify and state the relevant rules/laws
4. Apply the rules to the facts
5. State a conclusion
 In addition, answer the following:
1. What is the value of IRAC analysis?
2. What are the difficulties of IRAC analysis?
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3. Explain the role of legal reasoning in the courts and in